Dr. John Britton Murdered (1994)

Fri Jul 29, 1994

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Image: Dr. John Britton with the .357 Magnum he carried for protection when visiting the Pensacola Ladies’ Centre to perform abortions, 1993 [rarehistoricalphotos.com]

On this day in 1994, Dr. John Britton was murdered by a far-right anti-abortionist in Pensacola, Florida. Britton, who had replaced Dr. David Gunn after he was murdered the previous year, had armed himself after receiving death threats.

After Gunn’s assassination by an anti-abortionist, Dr. Britton began flying across the state of Florida to Pensacola weekly in order to perform abortions at the Pensacola Ladies’ Center. He continued to provide abortions even after receiving harassment and death threats, and began wearing a homemade bulletproof vest, carrying a .357 Magnum, and enlisted volunteer bodyguards to protect himself.

As Britton arrived at the clinic on July 29th, 1994, an anti-abortionist shot him dead with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The assassin also killed Britton’s bodyguard, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel James Barrett (aged 74), and wounded Barrett’s wife, June, a retired nurse.

Britton’s killer became the first American executed for assassinating a doctor who was providing abortion services.

  • Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    91·
    9 days ago

    I’ve heard that good people do not often kill others simply because of a differing belief. That is a serious problem when the cruel begin to outnumber the good.

    • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 days ago

      The anti-abortion extremists really do believe abortions are murder, and that killing the doctor is the lesser evil, to prevent them from performing other abortions.

    • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      9 days ago

      People keep talking in the abstract like this when it comes to abortion and it feels like it’s just talking past the other side rather than actually confronting why they’re wrong.

      People killing others en masse is one of the very few times that people universally agree that violence up to and including, killing the perpetrator, is justified.

      And with the abortion debate, some people genuinely believe that it’s murder. The argument against it is not that anti-abortionists are cruel but that killing an undeveloped collection of cells is fundamentally not murder as it is not causing pain or suffering to a being that can experience it in any meaningful way. If someone wants to believe in special magic that gives that collection of cells magic specialness then they can, but they have to acknowledge that there’s no scientific basis for it and thus it has no more basis being a broad societal law than the rules of Magic The Gathering.