How Nothing and Everything Has Changed in the 10 Years Since George Tiller's Murder
On May 31st, 2009, Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Wichita, Kansas, was shot and killed while he was serving as an usher at a church in his hometown. A grandfather of 10 known as “Saint George” in some reproductive rights advocacy circles, Tiller was known as a gracious, generous health care provider who was deeply devoted to protecting reproductive rights; he was also notorious in anti-choice circles for being one of the few providers to perform late-term abortions. His murderer, an anti-abortion extremist named Scott Roeder, was arrested and sentenced to life in prison in 2010.
Tiller’s violent death was a stark reminder of “the risk that abortion providers face every day just to provide health care to their patients,” as his former colleague Taylor Rose Ellsworth, MPH, director of education, research, and training at Physicians for Reproductive Health, wrote in a blog post commemorating his life and work. It also shone a light on the bitter divide between the pro- and anti-choice contingents in the United States, a chasm that has only grown larger with the appointment of anti-abortion Supreme Court Justices Neal Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, as well the recent passage of restrictive abortion legislation in Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and Louisiana.
Ten years after Tiller’s death, the debate over reproductive rights has never been more charged, and the risk to providers and clinicians themselves has never been more great. We spoke to Calla Hales, executive director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, which oversees four women’s health clinics that provide abortion care in the Southeast, to learn more about what has changed for abortion providers following Tiller’s death — and what’s stayed the same.
The daughter of a clinic director and an abortion provider who both knew Dr. Tiller, Hales was raised to be hyper-aware of security issues and the risks that could arise from providing abortion care. She was 19 and still in college when she received a call from a friend that an abortion provider had been murdered. “I didn’t know who it was. I thought it could potentially have been my dad,” she told Rolling Stone. When she finally got in touch with her mother, she learned it had been Tiller.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/george-tiller-death-abortion-10-year-anniversary-842786/
