![]() You'll need to undress completely from the waist down. You see a nurse you cannot name leading a middle-aged Indian woman to an examining room. Supposedly they were there to protect us. You hear voices drifting down the hall: The worst picture of an abortion doctor ever. He warns you not to use anyone's name or you will put them at risk. Tiller's patients - including two with catastrophic fetal abnormalities and a fifteen-year-old who was raped, all in the second trimester, all traumatized by the assassin who calls himself pro-life, a phrase he cannot utter without air quotes and contempt. This is the day he sees patients for the first of three visits, giving them the seaweed laminaria, which slowly dilates the cervix, and his normal caseload has been doubled by Dr. He apologizes for having very little time. He has a long face and no lips, which gives him a severe look. ![]() He's a tall man in green surgical scrubs, remarkably vigorous at seventy, emphatic in speech and impatient in manner. Twenty minutes later, the abortionist enters. The receptionist lets you through a fourth bulletproof door and leads you down a green hall decorated with lovely pictures of nature, leaving you in a small room stocked with tissues and free condoms. In the waiting room, a sad woman with a tight perm waits for her daughter. She studies it and hits the buzzer that opens the third bulletproof door. You put your ID into a turning wheel that spins it to the receptionist. What if it had happened while we were there? What if he couldn't complete the procedure?Īfter the first two doors of bulletproof glass, a sign warns that cell phones, cameras, and PDAs will be confiscated. In their shock, they mixed up the clinic and the church: We were supposed to be there. Tiller had just been killed, shot in the head as he passed out church leaflets. "There was some doctor who was shot who does abortions," he said. ![]() They wondered what was going on, a passing curiosity quickly forgotten.īut when they got to their room, the phone was ringing. As they drove to their hotel, a Holiday Inn just two blocks from the Reformation Lutheran Church, they saw television cameras. They arrived in Wichita on Sunday, May 31. One was George Tiller, a Wichita doctor who specialized in late abortions. They said that with her complications, there were only two men skilled enough to pull it off. They came from a religious tradition where large families are celebrated, and they wanted this baby, and it was very late in her pregnancy. The young couple flew into Wichita bearing, in the lovely swell of the wife's belly, a burden of grief. ![]()
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