A Death in Wichita Read Online Free PDF Page B

hospitals, St. Francis and St. Joseph, were Catholic and refused to perform abortions). He was medical director of the Women’s Alcohol Treatment Services at the Sedgwick County Health Department. He lectured widely about abortion to medical groups, promoting new scientific breakthroughs and backing stem cell research, which the anti-abortionists opposed. But he eventually stopped trying to explain himself and his work to the local and national media, an unproductive drain on his time.
    Like Lindsey Roeder, he was faced with a challenging set of options. His medical practice and expertise in reproductive health were growing by the week. His commitment to helping women at the most vulnerable time of their lives gave him a great sense of purpose, and he was certain that his work saved lives. According to the World Health Organization, there are 19 million unsafe or illegal abortions a year, which kill 70,000 women. Unicef reports that unsafe abortions cause 4 percent of deaths among pregnant women in Africa, 6 percent in Asia, and 12 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean. At his clinic, Tiller was building a body of knowledge about severe pregnancy problems that was unparalleled in the United States, if not in the world. He’d evolved into an expert in diagnosing fetuses with spina bifida, hydrocephalus, fused legs, and deadly chromosomal abnormalities. The walls at Women’s Health Care Services were becoming lined with letters of gratitude from women across the country, thanking Tiller and his staff for being there for them during a crisis. His career was extremely fulfilling, in addition to being lucrative.
    But starting in 1975, protesters began showing up in front of his clinic, and they were no longer a group of meek nuns there on behalf of the Catholic Church. These demonstrators were more likely associated with evangelical Christianity and they carried grotesque signs showing aborted fetuses and denouncing Tiller as a murderer. Threats to himself, his family, and his employees had become routine.
    What could a doctor do in these circumstances?
    “There are pivotal patients in everyone’s practice,” he once said to the Feminist Majority Foundation, when showing the audience photos of some females he’d treated. “This girl on my left is nine and a half years old. She came from Southern California with her mother and her aunt for a termination of pregnancy. I told them…she was too far along, and I couldn’t help. There were some stories in the newspaper about Dr. Tiller is getting ready to kill babies for a nine-year-old…I was trying to explain to my daughters, who were ten and nine at the time, about why I had planned to do this procedure…I was about thirty seconds into explaining about this [when] Jennifer said, ‘Daddy, a ten-year-old girl, a nine-year-old girl shouldn’t be pregnant, and simply not by her father or her grandfather or her uncle.’
    “One of the things that my father taught me was that to be credible in medicine, you must require for your patients the same care that you would require for your family. I made a decision that if my nine- and ten-year-old daughters at that time were in that situation, I would do the procedure. I did it for this girl. It turned out marvelously. There were no problems, no complications. And I made that decision at that time that I was going to help as many people as I possibly could…If a woman was or a girl was able to get pregnant, we should be able to do a termination of pregnancy.”
    If he couldn’t walk away from his work or from the expanding number of women who came to his clinic, he needed to adapt to the contempt of those around him. Some days, adapting was easier than others.
    In 1984, he was pulled over for driving under the influence of alcohol and he also had substance abuse issues. The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, a medical regulation body, told him to seek treatment and he did. One of his best friends was Don Arnold, who’d