Bart Slepian did indeed have breakfast with Bob Behn - in about 1991. He was curious about the anti-abortion point of view simply as a matter of intellectual understanding. Nothing Bob said changed Bart at all except to make him wonder how people could preach peace and be so mean.
Bart loved his faith, loved his family, and his devotion to his patients was precisely as the community extolled, not the weird view his niece retailed for money. Bart loved helping women have healthy babies and to be healthy themselves. He believed providing abortion was a moral act of a conscientious doctor and that while he didn't like doing the procedures, he believed women deserved safe, excellent medical care when they chose abortion as an option.
Bart's fury at protestors was well known because they so often targeted his family, too. The parking lot incident occurred when he was rushing to see if his kids were all right in the midst of the 1992 siege of Buffalo by Operation Rescue. That unyielding threat to his wife and children was the thing that could enrage him. Yes - he did take a baseball bat to one protestor (bruising his upper arm, not breaking anything) and breaking a van window for which he paid. Why did that happen? Because they were on his property singing Christmas carols on Hanukkah and would not get off his property even when repeatedly asked. Because of their refusal to leave, he felt threatened by them and responded understanably if not wisely.Through the years they stalked him endlessly, with one of the deacons in the local Catholic diocese even stealing the Slepians' garbage to find credit card numbers and other means of tracking him and plaguing him further.
The reported testimony of Eva Boldt and Amy Ashbery that Bart stopped to talk to them is utterly untrue. I was there every day they were there and saw him speak to none of them. Ever. He remained dedicated to the right to choose, he remained a loyal Jew, and he remained a great friend to the choice community.
The story posted here is lies, damned lies. And those of us who knew and loved him are disgusted by the attempts of the anti-choice zealots to turn the suspicion away from their own murderous selves. They already showed their true colors - a few days after Bart's murder, they piously delivered flowers to his office steps.
The flowers included one white rose.
What more does anyone need to know about the sources for this story?
-- Friend of Bart
