Tiller’s Murder: How Will It Impact the Abortion Fight?

Correction Appended: June 1, 2009

George Tiller long ago erased the line between his private life and his public cause, turning his Wichita, Kans., clinic into ground zero in the fight over late-term abortions. Tiller, 67, lived with death threats and was shot in both arms in 1993 by an antiabortion activist. His clinic had been bombed and was the frequent site of protests and prayer vigils, and he was the target of unsuccessful citizen-led legal challenges to shut down his clinic. Just a few weeks ago, the clinic was vandalized; security cameras and lights were damaged. Tiller asked the FBI to investigate. (Read “The Grass-Roots Abortion War.”)

So it was inevitable, perhaps, that within hours of Tiller’s death in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita — where he was slain by a single bullet as he handed out service bulletins to arriving parishioners — this latest act of apparent antiabortion violence was being scanned for its political implications.

“Please, don’t use this tragic situation to broad-brush the pro-life community as extremists,” the Rev. Pat Mahoney of the antiabortion Christian Defense Coalition told TIME Sunday. Condemning the murder, Mahoney worried that, “politically, this could not have happened at a worse time.” A Gallup poll in May found for the first time more Americans considering themselves pro-life than pro-choice. Mahoney had hoped this would inspire Republicans to take a hard line on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and her views, largely unknown, of Roe v. Wade. “This might take some of the wind out of that issue,” he said. (TIME Archive: “Fear in the Land”.)

In life, over more than three decades, Tiller unapologetically represented the most controversial aspect of the pro-choice cause: late-term abortions. In death, antiabortion activists fear he could boost the cause. They recall the public revulsion at the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Fla., in 1994, and the sniper killing of Dr. Barnett Slepian near Buffalo, N.Y., in 1998. Those and other acts of violence created a groundswell — if not in favor of abortion rights, then certainly against the antiabortion movement.

Tiller, one of the few doctors in America willing to perform late-term (or third-trimester) abortions, was a regular usher at his church, which was often the target of antiabortion protests. At about 10 a.m. Sunday, as the doctor was greeting church members at the sanctuary door, a middle-aged white male fired a single, fatal shot with a handgun. Three hours later police took a suspect into custody; they had a tag number on a fleeing powder-blue Ford Taurus registered in Merriam, Kans., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., and were waiting on Interstate 35 near Kansas City. The 51-year-old suspect got out of his car with his hands up, police said.

The suspect was identified as Scott P. Roeder, 51, by the Johnson County Sheriff’s office. Police were investigating his links to the antigovernment group the Freemen in the 1990s; he was also reportedly a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated a justifiable-homicide position on abortion. “He was on the radar screen” of the FBI, an officer said. In 1996, Topeka police found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, gunpowder and other items that could be used to make small bombs. He was sentenced to highly supervised probation for two years. He was expected to be charged Monday with murder and two counts of aggravated assault.

“Look, this could be some lone nut out there,” said Mary Kay Culp, the head of Kansans for Life. She feared that the murder would discredit the work her group is doing through proper channels. “We work through the legislative process. This is bad because it’s murder and bad because it’s a threat to the integrity of an important issue.”

Mahoney said he will be interested to see how President Obama handles the attack; on numerous occasions, including at a recent speech at Notre Dame, the President has stressed the importance of finding common ground on the issue by focusing on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies. After Gunn’s 1994 murder at the hands of Michael Griffin, then President Clinton “spent millions on investigations. It had a real chilling effect on pro-life groups.” Financial contributions went down and churches became skittish about hosting pro-life speakers, Mahoney said. “If you demonize the messenger you undermine the message.” (See a TIME graphic on the growth of crisis pregnancy centers.)

Obama’s initial reaction was expressed in a White House statement. The President said he was “shocked and outraged” at the murder. “However profound our differences over difficult issues, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.”

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Tiller found his life cause, according to a source close to his clinic, when the Wichita native’s father was killed in a plane crash. He discovered that his father, also a doctor, had provided abortions. At the urging of his father’s patients, the source said, Tiller let his general practice evolve into one focused on abortions. Many, if not most, providers stop performing abortions around 20 weeks; Tiller would extend past 24 weeks “in extreme cases of risks to the woman’s life,” the source said. “These patients were not simply women who waited too long to decide.”

But the doctor’s foes had a different view. In one story widely recounted by antiabortion activists, Tiller’s clinic allegedly performed an abortion at six months on a young girl forced by her parents to undergo the procedure. In the hothouse of Kansas abortion politics, Tiller was perpetually in the spotlight, the target of lawsuits and legislative efforts to crack down on late-term abortions. Former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius, now Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, always vetoed such attempts. Republicans in the Senate tried to rattle her confirmation hearings by raising the question of Tiller’s campaign contributions to her.

Tiller was in court earlier this year, charged with evading a law that required two separate doctors’ opinions before a late-term abortion could be performed. In March, a Wichita jury acquitted him.

To many pro-choice observers, Tiller’s murder smacked of a sort of frontier justice that could intimidate abortion providers in the country’s heartland. It was a sober reminder that, even as pundits have claimed abortion would not be a key issue in Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, it remains an incredibly divisive moral issue — and one that is still a province of extremists.

Operation Rescue, which kept a “Tiller watch” on its website, issued a strained denunciation of the killing. But the words of its founder, Randall Terry, were not so measured. “George Tiller was a mass murderer,” said Terry. “We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions.”

The original version of this story misstated that Paul Hill killed David Gunn. Gunn was killed by Michael Griffin. Hill murdered another doctor, John Britton, in Pensacola, Fla.

Read more TIME stories about abortion.

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.