Guest Author - Candance Gordon

I will be honest, before his murder on Sunday, I had never heard of George Tiller. As the story unfolded and the controversy surrounding his practice was mentioned over and over again, I became very curious about who this man was. Obviously he was very passionate about what he did and he believed in it enough to continue after a bombing and being shot once before, but what drove him to do the work he did, despite all the hardships it put on his life?

It was hard to find anything about George Tiller that wasn’t from an anti-choice group. The website for his medical practice has been taken down since his death, so the best source of information I could find was Wikipedia. According to them, he studied medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine from 1963-1967 and then went on to do his internship with the United States Navy, where he served as a flight surgeon in 1960 and 1970.

When he was done with his internship in 1970, he planned to start a dermatology residency, but when his parents, sister and brother-in-law were killed in an “aircraft accident” his life took a different direction. Upon learning of their deaths and that he had been named in his sister’s will to care for her then one-year-old son, he had planned to go back to Wichita, KS and close the practice where his father performed abortions and begin his own dermatology practice. After hearing about a woman who died from an illegal abortion, he decided to continue his father’s work.

Thus began Tiller’s career as not only a doctor that provided abortions, but one of the only ones in the U.S. that still performed late-term abortions. He provided abortions for women who learned late in pregnancy that the fetus they were carrying had severe or fatal birth defects and also for women who’s health would be irreversibly comprised by carrying the fetus to term. Bill O’Reilly claimed he also performed late-term abortions to alleviate “temporary depression” in pregnant women. But, it’s Bill O’Reilly, so who knows if that’s accurate or not.

Anti-choice activists held constant vigil outside Tiller’s Wichita clinic, Women’s Health Care Services, due to his performing these abortions after the 21st week of pregnancy. In 1986, the clinic was bombed and in 1993 he was shot in both arms by Shelley Shannon, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison. In January 2005, he was cleared of wrongdoing by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts after Christin Gilbert, a pregnant woman with Down’s Syndrome, died after having a multi-day procedure in his office. In March of this year, he was cleared of 19 misdemeanor counts of not consulting two “independent” doctors that a woman’s health was in jeopardy, which is the only way Kansas law will authorize the abortion of a viable fetus.

A CNN report on Sunday said, due to the controversy surrounding the work he did, Tiller generally wore a bulletproof vest and drove an armored car. But he believed that he was providing a valuable service to women that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to and was dedicated to continuing his work. I read one blogger who said, with all the controversy, his family couldn’t have been surprised by his murder outside the Lutheran Church where he was serving as an usher. Maybe not. That doesn’t make it any less shocking.

I don’t know how I feel about late-term abortion. I’ve never been in the situation where I had to make that decision. After feeling my babies move inside me and reaching the point where I can distinguish a foot from an elbow jabbing me in the ribs, I can’t imagine how heart wrenching it would be to have to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy after the first trimester. I admire Dr. Tiller for being there for women and their families who had to make that horrible choice and for continuing to do a job he felt so passionately about, despite the risk to his own life.

I received an e-mail Monday morning from a man who said Scott Roeder, the person charged with Tiller’s murder, was a hero. I guess he feels pretty passionately about his side of the issue, too. I don’t know how someone who considers all “life” valuable, as the pro-life side claims, can consider a murderer a hero. Sentiments like that scare me because that means that there is more than one Scott Roeder out there willing to do whatever it takes to get their point across and that things are likely to get much worse before they get better.