http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/1/dr_george_tiller_1941_2009_murdered
Guests:
Laura Shaneyfelt, Attorney for Dr. Tiller.
Dr. Shelley Sella, Obstetrician/gynecologist who worked with Dr. Tiller in
his clinic for the last seven years.
Dr. Susan Robinson, Gynecologist specializing in abortion care who has
worked in Dr. Tiller's clinic since 2005.
Bonnie Scott Jones, senior attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights,
which works to protect reproductive choice. She represented more than 2,000
of Dr. Tiller's patients in a case seeking their medical records.
Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. She has worked
with Dr. Tiller for more than two decades on the Clinic Defense Project to
protect abortion clinics and prevent anti-abortion violence.
Dr. George Tiller, speaking in 2008 at an event organized by the Feminist
Majority Foundation. Special thanks to Marc Bretzfelder.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of Dr. George Tiller, who was
speaking at an event organized by your group, Ellie Smeal, Feminist Majority
Foundation. In this speech, Dr. Tiller talked about a patient that had a
profound influence on his practice.
DR. GEORGE TILLER: I'm a chromosomally disadvantaged person: I am XY,
women are XX, and I am a woman-educated physician. This picture here is to
indicate that, one of the first people who taught me about the devastation
that can occur in a family as a result of alcoholism, drug addiction. This
is Haddie Mueller [phon.]. She's been dead for about thirty years now. But
she was one of my father's patients, and she did have three terminations of
pregnancy before it was legal. And she explained all of those things to me.
She explained about poverty, and she explained about abuse, and she
explained about alcoholism and drug addiction and how it impacted negatively
the family. So, I am a woman-educated physician in every aspect of my
understanding about abortion and about responsibility of women in the
family, both socially and financially.
There are pivotal patients in everyone's practice. 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 that I-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
don't
know how that happened. But 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.
My ten-year-old daughter said, "Daddy, you've got"-I was about thirty
seconds into explaining about this, because, you know, these are nine- and
ten-year-old girls that I'd had. And what they said-what Jennifer said was,
"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." My ten-year-old
daughter already knew about sex, about babies. And I, of course, thought
that she could car date when she was thirty-five years old by herself.
What 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. And age was-if a woman was or a
girl was able to get pregnant, we should be able to do a termination of
pregnancy.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Tiller, speaking to the Feminist Majority Foundation. He
also discussed the threats and attacks on him personally and on his clinic.
DR. GEORGE TILLER: While I was developing this practice between 1973 and
1985, I thought I was just Joe Blow family physician, raising my kids,
stamping out disease, and taking family vacations. But that's not true.
There are a lot of-it has been impressed on me that there are a lot of
people in the United States that don't like what we do.
And this is what an office looks like when it's been bombed at about
midnight. Our response was and still continues to be, "Hell, no, we won't
go!" I put up $10,000 as a reward. Nobody ever collected on it. That was
1986.
We tried to get back to being a normal clinic, but we had to put up some
gates and take other security arrangements. And again, I had my head in the
sand. I'm taking care of people, one patient-you know, we were trying to
make the world a better place to live, one woman at a time. And I said, "No,
this stuff isn't going to happen again in Wichita." Well, I was wrong. We
began to have people arrested outside our office. The clinic was blocked.
People couldn't get in. Federal marshals finally had to take over. After six
weeks, they had to take over the clinic. And things got back to relatively
normal.
The phrase "a shot in the arm" will have an entirely different-has had an
entirely different meaning to me. I was leaving the clinic, and I was shot.
I was shot twice as I left the clinic. The good news was that there was no
major damage. But what I found out was I wasn't nearly as tough as I thought
I was.
I hired a Brink's armored car to take me to and from-the first time I came
back into the-I drove my car back into the parking lot a couple of days
later, I thought, "This won't bother me." I was wrong. It did bother me.
Although it's not on here, for six weeks I hired a Brink's armored truck to
pick me up at 7:00 in the morning and take me home at 5:00 in the-as you
know, that was the only time in my life I've been able to leave the clinic
on time. You know, I can't-you know, just sort of on the side, I can't
imagine the enormous stress that our boys have coming home from Iraq and the
enormous amount of post-traumatic stress syndrome. But at any rate, after
six weeks, I felt well enough to drive myself in and out from the clinic,
but I never drove that car again.
We built a new building, put on an ambulatory surgical center. There are
no-there are no windows in this building. It has a metal detector. People
have to have airport-like security to get in and out of the clinic. There's
an anti-abortion clinic right next door. We are picketed all the time.
In August of 1994, I was the first on the anti-abortion hit list or
assassination list. And Janet Reno and President Clinton assigned federal
marshals to me for thirty months. They came to the house, got me, took me to
the office, stayed at the clinic. And they did that for about thirty months.
In 1991, Susie Gilligan-poor Susie-came to Wichita as-to help us put down
the-or help us get through the anniversary celebration of the Roe-of the
1991 Summer of Mercy. OK, the Summer of Mercy. I got to experience a Federal
Witness Program protection. Ashcroft, at the behest of National Abortion
Federation, Planned Parenthood and the Fund, they broke his arm, and they
supplied Federal Witness Protection Program protection for two weeks.
During this time, we developed a new Declaration of Reproductive
Independence, which says, for every woman, each pregnancy is an invited
guest into her body and a welcome addition to her family. Every woman,
everywhere, invited guest into her body and a welcome addition to her
family. We won. They went home. And all of my staff got to stand on the top
rung of the winners' stand. They received, for getting me-getting through
this, a dozen roses, a memorial or a commemorative flag that flew over our
office, and, in the best history of the Olympic Committee, $100 in small
bills passed under the table.
Oh, we had a year of retribution, where they harassed our employees at
home, stalked my wife, harassed business and vendors, and they tried to
close us down. They published a list of all of our vendors on the internet.
They put crosses that are exactly illegal in the eaves way.
But the good news is, we still live in the United States of America. The
good news is that in Kansas, we are able to use the wide definition and the
full implementation of the Roe v. Wade decision, which allows us to do
post-viability terminations of pregnancy.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. George Tiller addressing the Feminist Majority Foundation
last year. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We'll be back with our
guests from around the country in a minute.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read an excerpt from the Kansas City Star that just
came out. It says, "The suspect in custody for the slaying of Wichita
abortion doctor George Tiller was a member of an anti-government group in
the 1990s and a staunch opponent of abortion.
"Scott [P.] Roeder, [51,] of Merriam, Kan., a Kansas City suburb, was
arrested on Interstate 35 near Gardner in suburban Johnson County, Kan.,
about three hours after the shooting. Tiller was shot to death around 10
a.m. inside Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita.
"In the rear window of the 1993 blue Ford Taurus that he was driving was a
red rose, a symbol often used by abortion opponents. On the rear of his car
was a Christian fish symbol with the word 'Jesus' inside.
" Those who know Roeder said he believed that killing abortion doctors was
an act of justifiable homicide."
And it quotes Regina Dinwiddie, saying, "I know that he believed in
justifiable homicide." She's "a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who made
headlines in 1995 when she was ordered by a federal judge to stop using a
bullhorn within 500 feet of any abortion clinic." She said, "I know he very
strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the
little ones, both born and unborn."
"Roeder also was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that
advocated the justifiable homicide position," according to Dave Leach, an
anti-abortion activist in Des Moines, Iowa.
"Leach said he met Roeder in Topeka when he went there to visit Shelley
Shannon, who was in prison for the 1993 shooting of Tiller. [.]
"Roeder, who in the 1990s was a manufacturing assemblyman, also was involved
in the 'Freemen' movement."
Again, I'm continuing to read from the Kansas City Star.
"'Freemen' was a term adopted by those who claimed sovereignty from
government jurisdiction and operated under their own legal system, which
they called common-law courts. Adherents declared themselves exempt from
laws, regulations and taxes and often filed liens against judges,
prosecutors and others, claiming that money was owed to them as
compensation.
"In April 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after Shawnee County sheriff's
deputies stopped him for not having a proper license plate. In his car,
officers said they found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a
one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries, with one connected to a
switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb. [.]
"Morris Wilson, commander of the Kansas Unorganized Citizens Militia in the
mid-1990s, said he knew Roeder fairly well."
He said, "I'd say he's a good ol' boy except he was just so fanatic about
abortion.He was always talking about how awful abortion was. But there's a
lot of people who think abortion is [awful]."
"In recent years, someone using the name Scott Roeder has posted anti-Tiller
comments on various Internet sites. One post, dated Sept. 3, 2007 and placed
on a site sponsored by Operation Rescue called chargetiller.com, said that
Tiller needed to be 'stopped.'"
It went on to say, "It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be
compared to the 'lawlessness' which is spoken of in the Bible.Tiller is the
concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped before he
and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation."
I'd like to ask Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation,
to respond.
ELLIE SMEAL: Well, it's breathtaking. Of course, he's wrong in so many ways.
But you notice he doesn't believe in-when he was in the Freemen, whatever
that is, Society-in any laws. And here, Dr. Tiller followed the law. He was
investigated repeatedly, and he didn't do-all these clips, which says he's
wantonly doing things, it wasn't true. He was doing it because it was
necessary for the life and health of the women. And he was a very careful
physician.
We have a fairytale going on, Amy, that there aren't troubled pregnancies,
that every fetus has a brain. I mean, he-some did not. What I mean that is
they don't have a well-they don't have a head that's developed. To carry
that to term would only hurt the woman. We pretend that women don't have
cancer when they're pregnant and that the carrying it to term will kill her.
We pretend-I'll never forget him telling me about a woman who he brought-had
to fly in from Manhattan. She was a doctor's wife, and yet she had a fetus
that was growing a tumor that would not only kill her, it would kill the
fetus. And there was no-there was no possibility of survival, but he saved
her. Why, in a civilized society, would it be necessary to fly her in from
Manhattan?
We have allowed ideologues to ignorantly discuss these things, and we have
to have doctors-and he did. That speech he gave was to-in our group was to
our campus group. And he tried-he had film, slides. He tried to explain what
all the medical reasons are for these terminations.
And I really feel we need an education in this country, so that commentators
who-you know, that was really a diatribe against then-Governor Sebelius. It
wasn't really about what a medical reason for abortion is. We've got to take
this out of the political arena. And more doctors and nurses have to stand
forth and say why this is necessary for women's survival and health. I mean,
this is-
AMY GOODMAN: I think it might surprise people to know-
ELLIE SMEAL: -impossible.
AMY GOODMAN: -that the National Abortion Federation says Dr. Tiller is the
eighth abortion provider since 1977, in twenty-two years, to be murdered, to
be killed.
ELLIE SMEAL: Well, what I think they mean by that is not only the doctor,
but the healthcare workers. When you said that-remember, there's been four
doctors, but there's also been workers in clinics that have been killed
and-in this country. And there's been terrible terrorism. I believe this is
domestic terrorism.
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