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The women in my father's practice for whom he did abortions educated me and taught me that abortion is about women's hopes, dreams, potential, the rest of their lives. Abortion is a matter of survival for women.
-George Tiller, Voices of Choice, 2003
George Tiller, a lifelong women's rights champion and late-term abortion provider, was murdered on May 31, 2009, while attending church, the only location to which he ever went without a bullet-proof vest. He was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range while serving as an usher at the beginning of the Sunday service. Tiller specialized in late-term abortion care for women and was one of only three physicians in the country who provided abortion services for women who were beyond twenty-six weeks pregnant. Tiller saw clients from all over the world, and the walls of his Wichita, Kansas, clinic were filled with notes from patients thanking him for the service he provided them. Tiller provided services for women from all walks of life: young and old, rich and poor, rape and incest survivors, women with fetal anomalies. Tiller was also known for providing service to women with cases no other doctors would touch. When a nine-year-old girl who became pregnant when she was raped by her father was denied service by all the doctors in her southern hometown, Tiller not only provided her a late-term abortion, but he did it for free. As a physician, Tiller empathized with his patients' experiences and respected the need for women to have access to doctors who can provide that service safely. In Tiller's own words, "abortion is a matter of survival for women."1
I met and got to know Tiller at several different abortion conferences while making a documentary film, The Coat Hanger Project, which is about abortion and activism in the United States thirty-five years after Roe v. Wade. His clinic's booth at the conference exhibit hall was filled with polished stones that said "compassion" and "kindness" and mugs that said "attitude is everything." At a 2007 medical conference workshop held just after the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act was signed into federal law, Tiller took my hand and guided me through a demonstration of the second-trimester abortion technique of...