[presidio9]

Scott Roeder specifically said that he killed Tiller in order to prevent him from killing more babies in the future, not to avenge babies he killed in the past. And there was certainly a reasonable probability that Tiller would, indeed, have continued to kill more babies. This is not to say that the shooting was justified, but that the motive was to prevent future abortions, not past ones.

Somehow, the abortion industry managed to replace the irreplacable Dr. Tiller, but that wasn't really my point. Obviously, you kill Hitler because you're hoping to end the war/holocaust. If you know that Himmler will fill Hitler's shoes comfortably, there isn't much point in killing Hitler, other than to punish him. Same thing goes if there are other doctors willing to perform abortions. Admittedly Tiller was the worst of the worst, but others remained. How many lives did he really save? And the thing is, Roeder seems intelligent enough to realize this. No matter what he says, I still think he did it in part because he appointed himself executioner.

[Cicero]

That fellow Carhart was going to take over Tiller’s clinic and continue his work. But then he looked at the numbers, or his bank balance, or something, and he decided not to.

So Tiller’s clinic has been shut down, one of the few places where people could get that kind of late-term or partial-birth abortion done.

Which is not to say that this was the right thing to do. But he did say that his motive was to stop future abortions. And it does seem likely that there will actually be fewer of that kind of abortions done in the future.

[sitetest]

Dear presidio9,

“How many lives did he really save?”

In the short-term, a fair number. I read that Killer Tiller's clinic often butchered a handful of children each day, and he was the only provider of these “services” for some hundreds of miles.

It took a while for someone to step up to replace him, so the direct effect was to save scores, perhaps hundreds of babies.

But here's the thing - exterminating Killer Tiller certainly didn't bring the end of the legal regime of abortion on demand one day closer to an end. In fact, although it'd be tough to demonstrate direct cause and effect, one might readily assert that exterminating the murderer likely put that day further into the future.

And even if exterminating the butcher prolongs the current legal regime by one day, that's an additional 3500 lives lost.

So even in the most utilitarian moral calculus, ridding the earth of the verminous Tiller likely caused more harm, more death of innocents, than good, than more saved babies.

sitetest