Recent discussions have probed how one can, in an ethically consistent manner, condemn the murder of George Tiller, while simultaneously insisting that, as an abortionist, he was a mass murderer who had vowed to kill again. In all of these discussions, as well as the broader discussion all over the web, the answer always seems to come back to the issue of the necessity of legitimate authority to exact justice. In other words, Tiller should have been convicted, put on death row, and given a lethal injection, not gunned down by a vigilante. Okay, that has a certain prima facie plausibility to it, but lets look deeper here.

It seems to me that the only way the argument from state legitimacy can gain purchase is if we operate on the basis of an understanding of abortion that pro-lifers cannot accept, at least on the basis of common pro-life rhetoric. The argument from state legitimacy posits that abortion, which is understood and described as legally-protected genocide, does not call the legitimacy of the state into question. But if mass genocide doesn’t nullify the legitimacy of the state, then what would count? If our government were systematically rounding up all Latinos and gassing them, would we really be arguing that its wrong for citizens to violently oppose the government because, you know, after all they’re the government? If government-protected genocide does not mitigate the legitimacy of the state, its hard to see what ever could.

In other words, pro-lifers constantly call abortion murder and genocide, but when it comes to actually dealing with it, they treat it like a social ill that is undesirable, but best handled through due process and proper channels. In short, it doesn’t really look like they think is genocide.

But if abortion on demand really is the genocide we often say it is, this leaves many pro-lifers in the odd position of, in essence, arguing that it is completely impossible for the state to ever forfeit its legitimacy. Is that really what we want to be arguing? I certainly do not. Again, it seems to me that the only consistent way to condemn the murder of abortionists, as a pro-lifer, is to embrace some ethic of nonviolence. Only if violence itself is to be rejected as a tool of any and all social change and political action can we consistently stand against acts like this.