Blogging for LGBT Families: In gratitude and grief: thoughts on the death of Dr. Tiller and what it means for LGBT families

Posted on June 1, 2009, 4:12 PM, by Terry Boggis, under Advocacy, Families, General.

Terry Boggis, Director of Center Kids, Center Families

I was going to write about Pride, how it looks for LGBT families in New York City – the gatherings in parks, the marches, and our 21st annual Center Kids, Center Families Pride Picnic on June 27 (this year, featuring entertainment from “Shrek: The Musical“!) – but today, I can’t help but be distracted from the spirit of celebration by the heartbreaking murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita this weekend.

For the past six years, New York’s LGBT Community Center has been the central organizing point for a coalition-building, movement-building project called Causes in Common: Reproductive Justice and LGBT Liberation, which makes the connections between the shared work and struggle for choice and privacy, yes, but also for access to comprehensive, competent reproductive health services, for autonomy in matters of sexuality and reproduction, for safety, affordability, privacy, and access, all in the context of a social justice and human rights framework. Our network now includes over 140 LGBT and reproductive health and rights advocacy organizations, and Dr. Tiller’s killing impacts every one of us.

In many regions of the country, doctors willing to perform abortions are virtually nonexistent. In every region of the country, abortion providers and the patients they serve are picketed and threatened with violence, including here in the biggest city in the liberal northeast. And those of us who are students of history or old enough to remember know that elimination of services won’t eliminate the determination of desperate women to end pregnancies – they will just resort to dangerous, often deadly means to do so.

And it’s not just about abortion, or “choice” vs. “life”, or some other hopelessly reductionist frame. It’s about external forces – government, ideology, religion, fanaticism – walking into our bedrooms, our doctors’ offices, our emergency rooms and clinics, our relationships and families, our lives – and taking over, deciding for us who gets to have children and who doesn’t and when we can have them, who receives services and who doesn’t, the methods we are permitted to employ to create our families, which families count as legitimate and which do not, which lives matter and which ones don’t.

Dr. Tiller’s assassination is a blow to all of us who advocate for the right to create and define and value our families, in an atmosphere of safety and security. Before we celebrate, we mourn.

Terry Boggis, Director, Center Kids, Center Families