The Killing of Dr. George Tiller

On May thirty-first, two thousand nine, Dr. George Tiller was shot to death in the foyer of his church in Wichita while he served as an usher at the Sunday morning service. He was sixty-seven years old.

Tiller was one of the few physicians in the United States who performed late-term abortions. His clinic, Women's Health Care Services, had operated in Wichita for decades and had been a focal point of the national abortion debate since at least the summer of nineteen ninety-one, when Operation Rescue organized six weeks of mass protests here, blockading clinics, filling the jails, drawing roughly two thousand seven hundred arrests. They called it the Summer of Mercy.

The protests did not close Tiller's clinic. They did make him a more prominent target. In nineteen ninety-three, an anti-abortion activist shot him in both arms outside the clinic. He returned to work the following day.

Scott Roeder, who killed him in two thousand nine, had been orbiting the edges of the anti-abortion protest movement for years. Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Tiller's clinic closed after his death. He was one of only three physicians in the country providing late-term abortions at the time he was killed. His motto, printed on buttons and worn by his staff, was three words: Trust Women.

His murder renewed a national debate about political violence, the line between protest and terrorism, and what the steady erosion of abortion providers meant for access across the country. In Kansas, that debate has never fully resolved. The state where pro-slavery and free-state settlers once killed each other over which kind of America this would be continues to contest the question of what freedom means and who gets to say.