Dr. Tiller's Murder is a Tragedy for Queers, Too

Like many others, I was both saddened and shocked when I heard that Dr. Tiller was shot and killed in his church last weekend. His death is awful in so many ways: his spouse lost her husband and his children their father; friends lost a loved one; patients lost a compassionate provider. I've read that Dr. Tiller was one of only three doctors who provide abortions to women late in their pregnancy, leaving only two today - so we've all lost a valuable resource for women. It is clear that his courage and his dedication to providing women the care they needed were so much stronger than the harassment, vandalism, death threats, injuries, and even a prior assassination attempt that he and his clinic and staff faced. It seems that if I aspire to just a quarter of that courage it would serve the world well.

I suspect many folks out there consider themselves feminists and pro-choice, as I do. But while the queer ladies and the pro-choicers may greatly overlap, I don't see a lot of discussion out there about how the issue of reproductive justice affects us specifically as queers.

• Firstly and most obviously...not all of us are gold star lesbians! I'm certainly not. For a variety of reasons, plenty of queers have found themselves in sexual situations with someone who brings a different zygote into the mix, and they need and deserve the right to control their reproductive lives.
  
• Secondly, legally, the right to sex and the right to abortion are both based on the same constitutionally protected right to privacy. The good people at Lambda Legal, who understand all this way more than I do, say that "the legal arguments that laid the groundwork for Lambda Legal’s historic U.S. Supreme Court victory striking down all remaining sodomy laws in the country in 2003 relied so heavily on cases involving reproductive freedom that an attack against one must be seen as an attack against the other. In short, if people’s reproductive rights are threatened (as they are in the current political climate), then all of our privacy rights are threatened as well."
  
• Finally, reproductive justice is not only about the right of women to have an abortion. It's also about the rights of all people to understand and control their sexuality, their reproduction, their bodies! That means the rights of youth to comprehensive and inclusive sex ed, the rights of queer people to have children, the rights of women to not endure forced sterilization...and fundamentally, the same argument is at the the root of lgbtq rights: Nobody but you should have the right to tell you what to do with your body, including how or with whom to have sex or reproduce!
  

So that's why I'm saddened by the murder of Dr. Tiller as a woman, as a human being - and as a queer. If you are interested in learning more about these connections, Causes in Common has an awesome resource page.