Quebec babies on the way to George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita won’t be coming home ever again. Tiller specializes in late-term abortions, a polite way of saying that at any stage he will kill your unborn child (with an ultrasound-guided needle of poison to the heart) and deliver the poor thing while dressing it all up as compassion.

About 12,000 of Tiller’s victims have been completely healthy babies who were at, or well past, the age of survivability outside their mothers. He calls that barbaric situation “maternal indications for termination of pregnancy.” Similar euphemisms and doublespeak decorate all of Tiller’s well-honed system, which involves taking a new group of mothers in every Monday, killing the unborn baby on Tuesdays, inducing labour and delivering on Thursdays, and then mopping up and getting ready for another week of the same.

Tiller provides some ethical camouflage by being proudest of the victims who have genetic problems which are not survivable. By killing them before they would have died naturally, he claims to be doing everyone a favor. He ignores the physicians whose patients have closure and resolution of the grieving process by allowing the natural process to unfold. After all, you can’t charge up to $13,000 US for that. At one point, rumour had it that Tiller was the richest doctor in the USA. No matter.

Why would any Quebec taxpayer want to have anything to do with this man?

Dr. Will Johnston is president of Canadian Physicians for Life.

Canadian Physicians for Life is an educational organization representing physicians who hold that reverence for every human life lies at the root of all medical tradition. Through the ages, this tradition has been expressed in the Oath of Hippocrates. It was rephrased in modern times in the Declaration of Geneva (1948), which says in part, “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life, from the time of conception; even under threat, I will not use my medical knowledge contrary to the laws of humanity.”