Tiller's killer: what the murder of a late-term abortion doctor does and does not say about the anti-choice movement.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed

The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion

by Stephen Singular

St. Martin's Press, 352 pp.

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The late Dr. George Tiller was remarkable for his willingness to be one of a small and declining group of abortion providers who performed late-term abortions under the "health of the mother" exception protected by the U.S. Supreme Court. (This exemption was modified in 2007 by the Court, in a 5-4 ruling upholding a congressional ban on partial-birth abortion, an operation Tiller typically did not perform.)

Tiller came to his specialization through a family tragedy: the son of a physician and already trained as a doctor, he had made the decision to become a dermatologist when, in 1970, his father, mother, sister, and brother-in-law were all killed in an airplane crash. Feeling compelled to take over his father's practice, Tiller discovered in the process that his father had long provided abortions to women who had few other options. Tiller chose to continue providing this service.

While drawing on a national clientele of women who had no access to such abortions where they lived, he also caught the early and persistent attention of protesters from the more radical elements of the anti-abortion movement. The outspoken Tiller became a symbol of the dispute over late-term abortions, a hero to abortion rights advocates, and a brazen mass murderer to their most vociferous opponents.

Shut down temporarily on several occasions--and shot once in each arm--Tiller was also regularly harassed by powerful conservative politicians in Kansas. His visibility helped make Wichita ground zero for anti-abortion street theater. Then, beginning in 2005, Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly lifted him to a new level of national notoriety with frequent features on the Wichita clinic, calling him "Tiller the baby killer."

The denouement was inevitable, according to Stephen Singular, who tells Dr. Tiller's story in his new book, The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion. On May 31, 2009, sixty-seven-year-old George Tiller was shot dead in the foyer of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, where he was serving as an usher at a Sunday-morning service.

Tiller's murderer, Scott Roeder, seemed to have come right out of central casting: a mentally unstable and financially improvident middle-aged Kansan who had lost his wife, son, and home in no small part because of his...