I didn’t expect this, but the Peace Prize committee must hav looked at President Obama’s early initiatives and wanted to encourage him to keep going.

An anti-abortion terrorist with links to Operation Rescue has shot down a doctor in church. The irony is fairly thick, here. The religiously motivated murderer hits his unarmed target, who was an usher at his church while his wife was singing in the choir. The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada responds to the news.

Dr. Tiller was one of the very few doctors in North America who was able to perform late abortions on women whose pregnancies had gone wrong, or whose lives depended on the ability to get an abortion at a later stage. Women travelled from all over, including Canada, to access his services. Dr. Tiller has long been a target of anti-abortion protests, mostly by “Operation Rescue.” He suffered continuous harassment, including death threats, baseless lawsuits, pickets at his clinic and staff residences, vicious slander, and a previous assassination attempt in 1993, when he was shot in both arms outside his clinic by anti-abortion protester Rachelle Shannon.

“I’m in shock, I’m completely devastated. He was a friend of mine,” said
Joyce Arthur, Coordinator of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada. “Dr. Tiller was called a saint by many of his patients, and ‘Saint George’ by abortion providers across the nation. His incredible courage was inspirational.”

This was a doctor who performed abortions for women who were in danger of permanent injury if they continued the pregnancy or whose prospective child would have been damaged or suffering and perhaps doomed.There were three doctors in the U.S.; that’s one for every 50,000,000 women. And that should tell you how rare and non-frivolous a late abortion is. Most doctors won’t do one after four months because at that point, abortion is more dangerous than childbirth.

Outraged members of the public are sending money to support abortion, abortion funds for women who need financial help, and especially Medical Students for Choice, who opt to learn techniques of safe abortion in medical school.

Norma Scarborough, was the sensible soul of the pro-choice movement in Canada, died April 2. A mother of five children, she had compassion and a helping hand for the unwillingly pregnant. She was a founding member of CARAL and its president for several very important years, 1984 – 92. Thus she was of of the people supporting Dr. Henry Morgentaler in his struggle to bring safe, legal abortion to Canadian women.  In January of 1988 Canada’s Supreme Court struck down the criminal law on abortion because it violated women’s right to life, liberty, and security of the person. In other words, the law coerced women and put them in danger.

Louis DuLude recalls:

Once, I asked Norma why she cared so much about women’s right to an abortion. She told me that in the 1940s, when she was in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, one day she came back to the barracks and found a colleague moaning in bed. There was blood everywhere but the woman hadn’t summoned help because she was afraid to be punished because she had had an illegal abortion. Norma told me that the woman bled to death. She never forgot it. Asked later to help start a movement to legalize abortion, she didn’t hesitate for a minute before saying “yes.”

On this date in 1888, the Princess Imperial of the empire of Brazil signed the Golden Law, officially abolishing slavery in that country: “Brazil: Princess “Isabel the Redeemer” abolished slavery.”

Charles Darwin was interested in the wonders of nature and how they came about; but he had another great passion, and that was a hatred of slavery.

“Darwin’s Sacred Cause” points out that Darwin married into an abolitionist family and that the notion of common descent, even before he published his theory of how it might happen, was an abolitionist’s plea for equal treatment of all men and women.

As usual, “the BBC has the story: ” Darwin’s twin track: evolution and emancipation.”

“It makes one’s blood boil,” said Charles Darwin.

Not much outraged the gentle recluse, but the horrors of slavery could cost him a night’s sleep.

He was thinking of the whipped house boy and the thumbscrews used by old ladies in South America, atrocities he had witnessed on the Beagle voyage.

Handy-dandy torture device

The screams stayed with him for life, but how much did they influence his life’s work?

…new evidence suggests that Darwin’s unique approach to evolution – relating all races and species by “common descent” – could have been fostered by his anti-slavery beliefs.

The notion of evolution had been bruited about for some time—at least seventy years—but no one had a mechanism for how it happened.

Why was Darwin’s evolution uniquely defined by common descent, the joining of races and species through shared ancestry? Darwin’s common descent image is so obvious today that we forget to question where it came from.

"Am I not a man and a brother?"

Common descent in Darwin’s younger day was ubiquitous in anti-slavery tracts. Consider the words of the famous cameo, depicting a kneeling slave asking “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” That cameo was in fact the brainchild of the pottery-dynasty founder, Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin’s grandfather.

New evidence shows how indebted Darwin was to this anti-slavery heritage.

Darwin’s uncle Jos Wedgwood sold the firm’s London showroom, and ploughed the proceeds into an anti-slavery society, and in the 1850s (with American slavery still flourishing) the Wedgwoods continued using labels showing the slave under Britannia’s banner, which read “God Hath Made of One Blood All Nations of Men”.

The anti-slavery agitator Thomas Clarkson – the man who rode 35,000 miles collecting statistics in the sea ports on the evil trade – was another bankrolled by Josiah Wedgwood.

With a Wedgwood wife and mother, Darwin saw abolition as a “sacred cause” too, and in his culminating work, the Descent of Man (1871), he placed Clarkson at the moral apex of humanity and called slavery a “great sin”.

Darwin’s theory undermined the great moral excuse for slavery: that slaves belonged to a separate species.

In addition, Darwin was horrified by the torture that he saw when he visited slave-holding nations. (Britain had abolished slavery in the Great Reform Acto of 1832.) He saw the grief and fear of parents whose owners threatened to sell their children away from them. Ah, the traditional American family!