A moral civil war: The truth is millions of Americans believe Dr ‘Baby Killer’ Tiller deserved to die

A moral civil war: The truth is millions of Americans believe Dr ‘Baby Killer’ Tiller deserved to die

A moral civil war: The truth is millions of Americans believe Dr ‘Baby Killer’ Tiller deserved to die

David Jones

Daily Mail: June 7, 2009

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1191199/A-moral-civil-war-The-truth-millions-Americans-believe-Dr-Baby-Killer-Tiller-deserved-die.html

Somewhere beside a busy freeway in the dreary suburbs of Wichita, Kansas, there stands an anonymous, single-storey building. Its cream walls are stained by exhaust fumes and it has no external windows.

Guarded night and day by a private security patrol and CCTV cameras, and surrounded by ‘No Trespassing’ signs, it could be a top-security prison.

As vandals have spattered the perimeter fence with something that looks like congealed blood, it might equally be a laboratory where animal experiments are conducted.

In reality, this forbidding breeze-block rectangle is an abortion clinic – one of the most pitiful places in America.

Trading under the innocuous name of Women’s Health Care Services, for more than 30 years it has served as the last resort for a wretched procession of expectant mothers who have felt compelled to terminate their pregnancies at such a late stage that the mainstream U.S. medical profession has refused to help them.

Braving a gauntlet of howling protesters who keep a daily vigil outside the clinic, banging on their car windows and brandishing gruesome placards depicting dismembered foetuses, they have journeyed here in their thousands from all over America and even abroad.

Clutching overnight bags and often wearing clothing to disguise their condition, they range from schoolgirl rape victims to far more questionable cases, such as those who claim to be suffering from depression.

They came here because they knew that Dr George Tiller, the clinic’s controversial founder, seldom turned anyone away. Operating on the extreme edge of the minefield that is U.S. abortion law, his only stipulation was that clients must settle his $6,000 (£3,700) fee in full and up-front before he donned his surgical gowns.

As the dapper 67-year-old doctor, whose rimless glasses and soft voice lent him a vaguely sinister air, was among only a handful of physicians prepared to conduct late-term abortions (even terminating a pregnancy in the ninth month if he deemed it necessary), they had little choice but to agree. Thus, in recent years, Wichita has attained an unwanted soubriquet: Abortionville, U.S.A.

This remote city, out on the dusty Mid-Western plains, has also become the key battleground in the long-simmering war between so-called pro-lifers, who vehemently oppose abortion, and the pro-choice lobby, who defend a woman’s right to decide whether to have a baby or not.

Though we may find it difficult to comprehend in Britain, where abortion has become an accepted (and all-too often abused) and commonplace procedure, in the U.S. this struggle remains as violently divisive as any in the nation’s history, from slavery to prohibition.

And last Sunday, in what one eminent professor of moral theology described as ‘a very American crime’, Dr Tiller became its latest and most shocking casualty. As he went about his duties as an usher at the Reformation Lutheran Church – smiling, shaking hands and handing out pamphlets to worshippers – a gunman burst into the lobby and fired a single bullet into his head.

Among those startled by the balloon-like popping sound was the doctor’s wife, Jeanne, who was preparing to sing in the choir, one of her great joys.

Today, at a Methodist church selected to accommodate hundreds of mourners, Mrs Tiller and her four children will attend an altogether more sombre service: her husband’s showpiece funeral.

Within hours of the murder, Scott Roeder, a mentally unstable 51-year-old linked with extremist groups, who had staged acts of sabotage against abortion clinics for years, was stopped while driving near his home in Kansas City, 170 miles from Wichita.

If Roeder, an Old-Testament-thumping vitamin pill addict, is convicted, he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Unless, that is, his lawyers succeed in arguing he was psychologically impaired at the time of the shooting.

For all the moral dilemmas surrounding Dr Tiller’s work, we might expect the American nation to join in condemning his cold-blooded execution.

Perplexingly, however, revulsion at the murder is by no means universal. Many feel outrage, of course, yet a surprising number believe the man his enemies branded ‘Tiller the baby killer’ simply got his comeuppance.

These are not anti-abortion fanatics, but ordinary Middle Americans. Women such as the elderly news vendor at Wichita airport who, on learning why I was in town, said with a shrug: ‘I don’t lose sleep over the death of anyone who pushes a needle through a crying baby’s brain.’

Even among those who are sickened by the murder, many are reluctant to blame Roeder.

Instead, they point the finger at influential talk-show hosts such as Bill O’Reilly, the motor-mouthed voice of the extreme Right on Fox TV, who for years has waged a campaign against Dr Tiller so vitriolic that some say it was tantamount to incitement.

Having declared his outrage at the ‘heinous act of violence’ this week, Barack Obama is also under fire – from both sides.

Pro-lifers despise the liberal President for softening abortion regulations introduced by George W Bush. Pro-choicers are appalled by his appeasement of the anti-abortionists, most recently in a speech at Roman Catholic Notre Dame University, where he called for a new spirit of reconciliation between the warring factions.

Within a few days, Roeder appears to have made a mockery of the President’s entreaty. But what turned this one-time pacifist – who would tell his son off if he swatted an insect – into an allegedly fanatical killer, and why did he single out Dr Tiller?

Though these two men seemed as different as night and day – one a brilliant medical practitioner, the other a former factory worker and backstreet subversive – they shared similar traits.

Both, in their way, were devoutly religious and both were utterly convinced that when it came to their views on abortion, God was on their side; both pursued their ideologies with relentless single-mindedness.

Roeder, his ex-wife Lindsey told me, was born into a respectable Kansan household, though mental illness ran in the family. Upon retiring, his father had studied to be a Methodist minister, 51-year-old Mrs Roeder said.

Scott was reasonably bright and graduated from high school, but suffered psychiatric problems in his late teens and had little ambition. He was making envelopes in a factory when they met, in 1983, but Lindsey was attracted to his ‘happy-go-lucky’ nature and they became ’soul-mates’.

When it came to the abortion issue, the young Roeder appeared uninterested. Indeed, after his wife fell pregnant he even went with her to discuss their options at Planned Parenthood – a family planning organisation that is anathema to pro-lifers – although they kept the child.

During the early Nineties, however, he started to change. He stopped paying taxes as some form of protest at the government and began to see dark conspiracy.

He also joined subversive sects, including The Freemen, a quasi-religious cult based in the wilds of Montana who declared themselves outside all authority, and in 1996 were involved in an armed siege when the FBI surrounded their remote farmhouse seeking to arrest several members of the group. The stand-off lasted for 81 days, before the group surrendered.

In 1994, when Lindsey refused to listen to Roeder’s rambling monologues – and would not open their home to his homeless friends – he walked out on her and their son Nicholas, now 23.

It was around this time an episode occurred which may have been the catalyst for Roeder’s descent into violent anti-abortion activism.

During a U.S. TV interview this week, Lindsey mentioned that Roeder had been upset when he discovered that ‘a friend’ planned to terminate her pregnancy.

What she did not say, however, was that this unidentified friend was Roeder’s lover – and that the baby she wished to abort was his.

Whether or not Roeder’s unnamed girlfriend went ahead with the abortion we don’t know, but the very possibility was enough to send him into a near-suicidal depression.

After he recovered, he joined anti-abortion groups such as Operation Rescue (whose leader Randall Terry described Dr Tiller this week as a ‘mass murderer who reaped what he sowed’) and embarked on his fateful crusade.

In 1996, he was jailed for two years after explosives were found in his car; a conviction later overturned on appeal because the police search was judged to have been unlawful.

And six years ago, staff at an abortion clinic in Kansas considered him such a menace that they reported him to the FBI, who took no action. He was caught attempting to glue door locks there a few days before the murder, but nothing was done.

By then, Roeder had found a new hate-figure: George Tiller. He was enraged by graphic internet accounts of Tiller’s abortion procedures, which described how Tiller would stop the foetus’s heart with a drug injected through the mother’s abdomen, and then send the patient to a hotel, where she waited for up to two days until a stillbirth delivery was induced.

Last March, Roeder drove for four hours to Wichita to attend a court case involving the doctor. The evidence he heard there stoked his fury.

Under Kansas law, aborting a foetus considered to be ‘viable’ – or capable of surviving outside the womb – is only permissible when two independent medical experts agree that the mother’s health could be substantially impaired if the birth went ahead.

Dr Tiller was accused of breaching this law 19 times. The prosecution alleged that in every case he obtained the consent of the same ‘tame’ doctor – Kristin Neuhaus, who was paid $250 (£156) to $300 (£187) in cash by each patient for signing the necessary forms.

Tiller denied the charges and was acquitted. During the trial, however, the doctor – who lived in a mansion on an exclusive estate – admitted that he had conducted up to 300 late-term abortions in 2003 alone, charging a fee of $6,000 (£3,700).

Had Tiller not been shot he would have faced a fresh prosecution, this time brought by the Kansas health department, who also believed his collaboration with Dr Neuhaus to be improper.

Contained in their case was the allegation that he carried out an abortion on a 10-year-old girl, who was 28 weeks pregnant, without gaining genuinely independent consent.

Four years ago, Christin Gilbert, a 19-year-old Texan girl with Down’s syndrome, died of sepsis – an acute bacterial infection – soon after he aborted the baby she had conceived as a result of being raped.

After the injection to kill the foetus, Christin was in her hotel room when she started to suffer agonising stomach spasms. She was rushed back to the clinic, then to hospital, where she died.

After an inquiry, Dr Tiller was again exonerated. Yet, according to his detractors, his staff’s greatest concern that day was to preserve the clinic’s reputation.

Transcripts of the 911 emergency call made by one of his staff suggest they may be right. ‘Please, please, please! No lights, no sirens,’ implores the female clinic employee. She is also said to have placed the 911 operator on hold for 45 seconds while asking how much she should tell him, and playing down the seriousness of Christin’s condition.

For every damning story like this, however, the are others portraying Dr Tiller as a kindly, dedicated physician whose only motive was to help desperate women.

Among those who risked public opprobrium to support him this week (one in three Americans believes late-term abortion should be legal) was Miriam Kleiman, from Virginia, whose 29-week pregnancy he terminated nine years ago.

Scans revealed her baby to have such severe brain abnormalities that it would either die in the womb or soon after birth.

Unable to face a ‘two-month death watch’, she pleaded with her doctor in Virginia for an abortion. As the foetus was so well formed he would not help. Instead he scribbled the name ‘Tiller’ on a scrap of paper and handed it to her.

Dr Tiller and his staff couldn’t have been more professional or compassionate, recalled Mrs Kleiman, who now has two healthy sons. She wept on hearing that he had been shot.

She was not alone. But his death must have been half-expected, for over the years his clinic had been firebombed and besieged by mobs. Death threats had become routine.

The first attempt on his life was made in 1993, when Rachelle Shannon, a 37-year-old anti-abortionist shot him in both arms. Though she languishes in jail, she is still regarded as a pillar of respectability by some and became one of Roeder’s heroes.

Following that attack, the doctor had his car armour-plated, moved to a gated community, employed a bodyguard, varied his travel routine and wore a bullet-proof vest.

Knowing all this, Roeder struck at church – the place Dr Tiller relaxed his guard – and made sure to aim the pistol at his head.

On the Friday before the murder, Roeder’s ex-wife told me he had insisted on taking their son to the pictures and later for dinner. ‘Normally he observed the Sabbath on a Friday, but this was like his Last Supper,’ she said.

Perhaps so, but one question remains: knowing that fanatics such as Roeder had him in their sights, why didn’t Dr Tiller, who was, after all, a wealthy man in the autumn of his years, simply close his clinic and retire?

A reserved man with an acerbic wit (’Hi there, I’m Satan’ he once quipped when meeting opponents in the pro-choice advice centre which opened next-door to his clinic), he never intended to follow such a high-profile career. After graduating from medical school, he became a Navy flight surgeon and seemed set to remain in the military.

In 1970, however, when his parents were killed in a plane crash, he inherited his father’s medical practice; and, thumbing through the files, he discovered that Dr Tiller Senior had secretly been carrying out abortions – which were then still strictly illegal in America – for years.

By all accounts, he was aghast. After pondering on the morality of abortion, however, he decided his father had acted according to his conscience and vowed to continue his ‘noble’ work.

Dr Tiller rarely explained himself, but during his recent court hearing he said he took succour from the support of his daughters – and one conversation with them stuck in his memory.

It apparently took place when they approached him as he worked in his study, and said: ‘Daddy, if not now, when? If not you, who? Who is going to stand up for women with unexpected and badly damaged babies?’

Comforted by their backing, he found the strength to carry on. In Scott Roeder, however, he would meet a man who was also on a mission, sure in the knowledge that right was on his side.

So Dr Tiller becomes the ninth abortion doctor or clinical worker to be murdered by fanatics who purport to cherish human life during the past 15 years; a statistic that shames the Land of the Free.

With America’s unofficial civil war now at fever pitch and reconciliation beyond even the unifying powers of President Obama, ‘Tiller the baby killer’ surely won’t be the last.