The clinic is low-rise and cream colored. There are no windows. Video cameras are posted on all corners. The walls bear large “No trespassing” posters warning violators they will be prosecuted. A police car idles at the entrance day and night, and armed guards patrol the back fence. As patients enter the facility, they pass through a metal detector.
The building is a medical center in Wichita, Kansas, one of only three in the US that serve women seeking abortions in late stages of pregnancy. But it looks like a fortress or a high-security prison. Inside, it is designed to help patients. Outside, it is custom-built to thwart an ever-present threat.
But its high-tech security measures were not enough to save George Tiller. His name is still printed above the front entrance of the clinic alongside the words “Women’s health care.” But after 30 years of almost constant harassment, intimidation and death threats, he finally succumbed.
He was gunned down on May 31 at Reformation Lutheran Church, which had accepted him as a member after he was expelled from his previous church.
At 10:03am, Tiller was standing just inside the church. He was taking his turn to be an usher, and was handing out leaflets on church events. The service had just started and his wife, Jeanne, was inside.
A man, identified after his arrest as Scott Roeder, 51, allegedly walked up to Tiller as he stood alongside three or four others and aimed a gun at his head. He shot once. Worshippers described the sound as like a balloon popping.
Reverend Lowell Michelson had known Tiller for many years and had come to respect his calm endurance. They had talked about the dangers he faced, though Michelson declined to reveal the details of their conversations on pastor confidentiality grounds.
“He endured so much. He was committed to women’s health issues. He made that a priority in his life even though he knew of the risks,” Michelson said.
A fellow congregant, who asked not to be named in order to protect his wife who worked with Tiller at the abortion clinic, said people were shocked and startled.
“He believed in what he did. He really believed it, and that’s what gave him strength,” the man said, crying silently outside the church.
The man said those who attacked Tiller over the years had misunderstood his work: “He saw many women who had tried so hard for children, but then suffered the agony of having fetuses with terrible deformities. The picture the anti-abortionists show is always of a perfect beautiful baby, but that’s not what he was dealing with. He did what he did out of love.”
Sarah Coe was one of the 250 to 300 women with late-stage pregnancies who seek help every year at Tiller’s fortress-clinic. Coe, who talked to the Guardian using a pseudonym, had an abortion in Wichita two years ago last week. The confluence of the anniversary of her baby’s and Tiller’s death was, she said, very hard to bear.
At 22 weeks of gestation it was discovered through ultrasound and other tests that the fetus of her first child had hydrocephalus — an excess of fluid on the brain. Coe and her husband were told that it would be born without brain function and would have no conscious life.
“We made a difficult decision that that wasn’t the life we wanted for our child,” she said.
No doctor on the entire east coast of the US would accept her as the baby was beyond the 20 weeks needed for a fetus generally to become viable outside the womb. They were referred to Tiller. She says the care they received at the clinic was exceptional.
“We were able to see our little boy after he was delivered, no longer alive, and to touch him and say goodbye. They handled the cremation for us and we have his ashes in our home. It was the worst experience in our lives and they made it so much easier to bear,” she said.
The process took four days. During that time Coe and her husband ran the gauntlet of anti-abortion protesters.
“We were mobbed. They were banging on our car window. My husband wanted to explain and tried to talk to them but quickly backed off. Just by winding down the car window he was putting himself at jeopardy,” she said.
Tiller knew intimately about that sense of jeopardy. His father had a medical practice at the same spot the clinic now occupies, and George entered the family business, studying at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in the 1960s. Graduating, he took up a medical internship in the US Navy and served as a flight surgeon in California. The training stuck with him: he retained the look of a military man, with close cropped hair and rimless glasses, until his death at age 67.
It was just as well: practicing medicine for Tiller had many of the features of combat. His clinic was bombed in June 1986. In 1991 anti-abortionists descended on Wichita from all over the country to picket it. During the course of that summer, some 2,700 protesters were arrested and troops were sent in to keep the mob under control.
Two years later, Tiller was leaving the clinic in his car when a woman, Rachelle Shannon, shot at him. He was hit in both arms, but survived. As she walked away, Shannon looked back and said: “Did I get him?”
She is still in prison, serving time for the shooting and for having firebombed other clinics across the US. The next day Tiller was back at work.
“I’m a healthcare provider, we had patients to take care of. Really, I feel very good,” was all he would say of the incident.
In 1998, after a doctor in New York state was killed by a gunman in his home, Tiller was told by the FBI that he was No 1 on the violent anti-abortionists’ hit lists. That did not deter him either. His only concession was to wear a flak jacket to and from work. He was wearing one such jacket on May 31 when he was shot in the head.
Protesters continued to gather outside the clinic every day, though from 1994 they were forbidden by federal law from blocking the entrance. They would hurl obscenities at anyone entering. Sometimes they would follow pregnant women and nurses to their hotel rooms or homes and push leaflets under the door. The leaflets showed gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses — their severed limbs and heads prominently displayed.
Most Sundays protesters would gather outside the Reformation Lutheran Church, heckling him and other worshippers as they assembled for prayer. Every day large crowds would appear outside his abortion clinic, chanting “Killer Tiller!” “Babies Killed Here!” and “Tiller’s Slaughter House!”
On top of all that, there were almost incessant prosecutions. In March Tiller was put on trial in a case brought by anti-abortionists who claimed he had broken Kansas state law that requires all terminations beyond 22 weeks to be approved by two “independent” doctors. Tiller was charged with having used an employee to provide the second opinion, but the jury rejected the claims and he was acquitted on all charges.
Within moments of the verdict, the state’s health board announced that it was launching its own prosecution — a case still ongoing when Tiller was killed.
Over the years, Tiller gave very little away. He would turn down requests for interviews.
“He was a quiet man,” says Ruth, who lives around the corner from the clinic. “He rarely talked about his problems.”
In March, he gave a tiny insight into how he coped with such extraordinary pressure. He told the jury at his trial that: “Quit is not something I like to do.”
He said his wife, Jeanne, his three daughters — two of whom are doctors — a son and 10 grandchildren were all sources of comfort. Then he recounted to the jury one conversation that he said had given him great succor.
“My daughters came into my study. I was reading. And they said: ‘Daddy, if not now, when? If not you, who? Who is going to stand up for women with unexpected and badly damaged babies?’ I had the support of my family, and we were able to proceed ahead,” he said.
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