On this morning eight years ago, while having breakfast, I got a phone call from a member of Dr. George Tiller’s family that he had been assassinated two hours before the call. I was devastated, and my family was terrified. George was a dear friend of mine, a medical colleague, my only peer in the work that I do, confidant, and one of the only persons in the world who shared my experience in performing late abortions for desperate women with desired pregnancies complicated by horrible fetal abnormalities. The news was a shock, a drop of bricks on my life, a terrible, painful loss, and a frightening reality — but it was not a surprise. Antiabortion fanatics had been threatening George’s life for decades — as they had mine. But the level of intensity of the threats that George had experienced were many hundreds of times worse than what I experienced. George was in Wichita, Kansas, and the Attorney General of Kansas was openly persecuting him for political advantage; the community leaders were antagonistic toward him or passive in the face of unconscionable aggression by the anti-abortion fanatics. George was shot in both arms in 1994 by Shelley Shannon, who traveled from Spokane, Washington to Oklahoma City to buy a gun, rent a car, and drive to Wichita to kill George. She almost succeeded. Later, she wrote a letter to me from Kansas State Prison with the message: you’re next. It was chilling. The assassination of my friend George in the lobby of his Lutheran church on a quiet Sunday morning was hideous and terrifying. This terrorist attack of political violence had the intended effect: we were terrified. I was immediately put under 24-hour armed guard by the US Federal Marshals at the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder. They surrounded me in my office and as I was taken to a memorial event for George at the Temple Emmanuel in Denver to speak about my friend. They surrounded me as I was taken to George’s funeral in Wichita where thousands of people were gathered, most to pay their respects, but some anti-abortion fanatics to cheer and jeer. I had the honor of being a pallbearer. I was profoundly sad. I liked the world better with George in it.
My remarks at the memorial service in Denver for George on June 4, 2009 were published on June 19 in The Colorado Statesman at www.drhern.com/pdfs/TillerTE.pdf or www.drhern.com/… .
The antiabortion fanatics now control, or decide who controls, The White House, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the US House of Representatives, the US Senate, and the US Supreme Court. They will stop at nothing to end women’s reproductive rights along with many other freedoms and civil rights — as long as they are in power. You can change that.
Warren M. Hern, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D. www.drhern.com
