A shriek of inarticulate* anguish

What follows is a feverish rant borne of grief and frustration.
I was loudly and proudly pro-life (and fundamentalist Christian) for much of my life. My family remains both of these things.
I feel vomit rising in my throat (apolgies for being graphic) when I read the thousands of comments on the popular news blogs hardending their hearts to the plucking of this human being–of George Tiller– from planet earth because “he did the same thing to the 60,000 unborn babies who never got to see the world.”
I want to cry and scream and shriek to the heavens over the righteous and smug and wholly intentional blindness–the SHEER #$**&@!!!-ing self-satisfied blindness–of people I once claimed as ideological kin (Only I was only 17–at least my smug obtuseness can be excused!)
People who smugly proclaim that they are “saving lives” and that G. Tiller’s death “forced the women who had appointments with him that Monday to now have to carry their their precious babies to term, praise God. [Amen]. ”
I genuinely try to avoid demonizing the people behind ideologies–I make such an effort, even when it burns– but I feel such anguish, all I can say now to them is:
You heartless bastards.
You cruel, happy folk.

Do you hearts of stone know what these women, their partners, and their families are doing now? Many of them are grieving in the acutest of anguish for the longed-for being within them (or their female partners) that will be forced into the world with its internal organs hanging outside of it.
This tragic being will suffer the most exquisite and prolonged of tortures–likely days or weeks longer than if they’d been aborted—-until it finally dies, likely in hospital, and likely before the stricken, the bloodshot, the anguished eyes of its mother and loving family members. Poeple who will be haunted for every sleepless night of their lives henceforth. A mother haunted and racked with guilt over feeling that she is the one who forced her offspring into such agony.
If not the unborn, it will be the already born who will face torture and death–a woman who cannot undergo lifesaving chemo because of the fetus inside her, or who will suffer massive organ failure if she goes into labor.
Is this LIFE, you bastards?
Are you so very sure Jesus Christ is standing in the wings blessing the terror and torture of these poor souls—-both the born and the unborn? All for WHAT? To give a few hours of breath to a being who had never before drawn even one breath? Jesus, who ordered his followers to abandon their worldy goods and serve the poor, the meek, the abused–do you think he would wish a nanosecond of such a LIFE on His creation, on this piteous creature forced into the world, only to die in anguish over a few days instead of a few blessedly short hours?
Your cruelty and the joy with which you display it have me weeping.
I can’t even visit the usual web communities I share with conservative Protestant groups. I value and respect most of the members, but I can’t bear to hear them rejoice that this week, “babies’ lives were saved.”
No, joyously ignorant ones, this week, torture was visted, death was glorified, pain and suffering were exalted. And I am not even talking about George Tiller himself.
I’m sick over this and I know the worst is yet to come. Because I still have one foot left in the evangelical American world, and because I closely track the activities of the most extreme fringes of this community, I know what many progressives and moderates do not: that the outer fringes of the fundamentalist Right are becoming much , much more hardline and extreme (especially in relation to gender roles–they are one step short of mandatory burquas; many have already re-instituted dowries and bride prices). I am talking about people who make Dr. Dobson of Focus on the Family look like Keith Olbermann.
And they are mobilizing by playing off of their members’ fear of the evil and liberal Obama admin. Their funding and membership swells every year. They are getting the (positive) attention of moderate Conservatives like Dobson.
And the hell of it is that with abortion, THEY WILL WIN because, really, absolutely no one thinks an abortion procedure–especially a late term one–sounds wholesome and desirable. No one thinks the description of a procedure using forceps on the skull of an 8 month old fetus (a common image evoked by the Forced-birthers) is anything short of grotesque. And so the public will be swayed back to being predominantly anti-abortion. Because of propoganda and their own abject ignorance of why legal abortion is an essential human right.
I hate to be a prophet of doom, but I portent that a dreadful storm is coming.
* Trolls and hardcore Forced-birthers–I am in no mood to suffer your infamy on this thread. So proceed at your own peril.