James Kopp, the anti-choice terrorist who murdered Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1998, has been sentenced to a life sentence plus ten years. This is a much longer sentence than the 25-year term that Kopp requested.
Last year, the New York Times Magazine carried this moving story by Eyal Press, the son of Slepian’s colleague. In “My Father’s Abortion War,” Press described the changes in American society and culture since Slepian’s murder:
More than seven years have passed since that morning, and viewed one way, everything about the abortion conflict in the intervening period has changed. The mood of futility and desperation that fueled the violence aimed at abortion providers in the mid-90’s — a spate of attacks that left six doctors and clinic workers dead — appears to have lifted somewhat, which is perhaps one reason the attacks have abated. The number of abortions performed in America has steadily declined. Among right-to-life advocates, the focus of energy has shifted from the doorways of clinics to the corridors of Congress….
Like many people, I assumed at first that Buffalo was a flash point because of the generations of Irish, Polish and Italian Catholics who had made the city their home through the years and whose faith taught that abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for whatever reason, is wrong. Yet during the 1970’s, when the opposition to abortion indeed came almost exclusively from Catholics — the Catholic Physicians Guild, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo — the right-to-life movement wasn’t terribly radical. There were few street demonstrations back then….The relative calm can be traced partly to the fact that the revolt against Roe v. Wade took time to build. Few people in Buffalo appreciated at the time that by removing the issue from the legislative process, the Supreme Court would leave millions of Americans feeling that they were denied a say over what they viewed as a life-and-death matter. By short-circuiting a debate that was only beginning (not unlike the issue of gay marriage today), Roe would escalate the very conflict it was designed to quell. * * *
By the mid-1980’s, however, the mood was changing, thanks to a development that would transform the face not only of the right-to-life movement but also of modern conservatism and, in turn, America: the political reawakening of evangelicals…[T]hey began waging war against the tide of secular humanism sweeping the culture, something evangelicals of an earlier generation would have considered a waste of time.
-Bridget Crawford and Amanda Kissel
