Dr. George Tiller is defined by those who he helped

Tiller’s clinic in Wichita after he was slain.

Barbara Shelly’s Opinion piece in the Wichita Eagle :   “Phillip Wood and his wife were joyfully preparing for the births of twin boys when, midway through the pregnancy, everything went wrong.

An amniocentesis revealed a disease of the placenta. Both twins were dying. With his wife prone on a cot in the back of a van, Wood drove from their home in Columbia, Mo., to a hospital in Florida for a surgical procedure that might save one of the boys.

Doctors at the Catholic-affiliated hospital told them neither twin would survive, and his wife was at risk of a ruptured uterus. That would make her infertile and could threaten her life.

“They had no information as to where we should go. They just said, ‘Find an abortion,'” said Wood, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri.

Wood and his wife drove to a clinic in Illinois, but doctors there elected not to abort the fetuses, saying the size of one twin’s head was larger than the clinic’s guidelines allowed.

With his wife in physical and emotional distress, Wood drove to Women’s Health Care Services in Wichita.

They ran the gantlet of protesters, who pleaded with Wood’s wife not to end her pregnancy. Inside, they signed forms required by the state informing them, among other things, that their sons looked human and could feel pain.

After all that, they met George Tiller.

“I wasn’t prepared for this active, energetic, very vocal guy,” Wood said. “He took time to listen to us. He was very appropriate and involved me in all steps of the abortion.”

After the twins had been aborted, Tiller gave the parents time with them. They performed a brief baptismal ceremony.

“While I held the bodies of my sons he stood to the side and wept, very quietly and very briefly,” Wood said.

Tiller, the physician slain May 31 in Wichita, was too often defined by his adversaries. On Web sites, TV and radio talk shows, and in legislative hearings, they portrayed him as the reckless “abortionist,” willing to euthanize babies close to birth just so the mother could fit into a prom dress or attend a rock concert.

That portrayal always defied logic. Would someone in the third trimester of pregnancy really travel to the heart of Kansas and pay a $6,000 medical fee just to fit into a size 6 party dress?

“There has been a very deliberate strategy by the most extreme opponents of abortion to demonize Dr. Tiller and the kind of service he provided, and by extension to demonize women and their motives,” said Peter Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri.

It’s a cruel deception.

The overwhelming majority of the 250 to 300 women a year who sought late-term abortions from Tiller had planned their pregnancies. They came to him heartbroken and afraid, carrying fetuses with malfunctioning kidneys, missing organs and syndromes certain to cause death in the womb or soon after birth.

A much smaller number of late-term patients were rape and incest victims, sometimes very young girls. Some were directed to Tiller by prosecutors.

Contrary to the false portrayal of him by anti-abortion activists and politicians, Tiller didn’t automatically consent to perform an abortion for any patient who requested one. He understood the constraints of Kansas law, and he knew he was being watched.

But even in those instances, he tried to help. Over the years, Tiller arranged dozens of adoptions, Brownlie said.

Inside Tiller’s fortressed clinic, Phillip Wood and his wife met two other couples who, like them, were in the throes of crisis pregnancies.

The walls of the clinic, Wood noted, were papered with hundreds of cards and letters from patients expressing gratitude. Wood and his wife later added one of their own.

Wood wrote another letter last week. It was to the congregation of Reformation Lutheran Church, the sanctuary where Tiller was shot while handing out bulletins before the May 31 service.

“I believe you have lost a selfless and dedicated health care professional and someone who did the best he knew how to serve others,” Wood wrote.

The prom queen who talked her way into a late-term abortion doesn’t exist. She’s a creation of Tiller’s enemies.

Wood and his wife are real people, and so are the thousands of patients who wrote the “thank you” notes that now serve as a memorial wall to a fallen physician. They are the ones who should define his memory.”

Barbara Shelly is a member of the Kansas City Star editorial board

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Bumpersticker seen in Kansas:

Choose life or we’ll kill you.


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