A Death in Wichita by Stephen Singular Read Free Book Online

high-powered rifle were fired through the front windows and into the waiting room of Dr. Hern’s clinic, just missing an employee. The physician immediately called a press conference and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter.

IV
    In 1986, Dr. Tiller’s office was anonymously pipe-bombed, affecting about two-thirds of the building. Nobody was hurt, but the explosion caused $100,000 in damages. Instead of rethinking his abortion practice or taking a vacation to get away from the destruction, Tiller (like Hern) became more resolute and defiant, now advertising his services nationwide. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, mop haircut, bland expression, and efforts to maintain his politeness, he was fierce in his convictions. Three days after the bombing, he planted a sign outside his office.
    “Hell no!” it proclaimed. “We won’t go!”
    He put up $10,000 as a reward, but nobody ever collected on it. He installed gates, fencing, floodlights, metal detectors, and bulletproof glass.
    “And I said, ‘No, this stuff isn’t going to happen again in Wichita,’” he recalled years later. “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.”
    He wore a bulletproof vest to work, bought an armored SUV to get to and from the office (costing another $100,000), varied his route to the clinic, drove in the right-hand lane, and brought armed guards onto his staff. He hired high-powered attorneys and began donating money to the state’s top-ranking pro-choice politicians, eventually forming a political action committee that he named ProKanDo. Yet he did little in the realm of public relations, even when abortion foes put up billboards and “wanted” posters of him around town asking, “Is Tiller Above the Law?” One heard grumbling in Wichita, from his own supporters, that he didn’t do enough to promote himself in the community or media, or enough to let the city and region know that he didn’t just perform abortions.
    When patients were referred to Tiller by physicians nationwide, they were fully questioned by his staff to determine if they truly wanted to end their pregnancies. His clinic had seen hundreds of cases where potential patients had been screened and the women had changed their minds. Tiller helped these mothers put their babies up for adoption, but only if the newborns were going to a pro-choice family. He didn’t publicize this adoption service or that nearly every day he confronted extreme medical problems with women who had nowhere else to go.
    “The wife of one of my closest friends got pregnant,” says the Wichita native and author Robert Beattie, “and there were serious complications. They went in to see Dr. Tiller and learned that their baby wasn’t developing a head. They needed to abort the fetus, and as they walked into his clinic, protesters came up and screamed at them, calling them murderers and baby killers.”
    Tiller was much less concerned with Wichita’s perception of him than with the science being developed inside Women’s Health Care Services, and with keeping up morale at the office. He wasn’t the only one targeted by anti-abortion activists. Pictures of his employees were hung on telephone poles, next to images of aborted fetuses. Abortion foes got the home addresses of his staff and rode through their neighborhoods with bullhorns, denouncing Tiller and those who worked for him. Each weekday morning, employees attempted to ignore the verbal abuse from protesters greeting them at WHCS. Some had their own brand of defiance, goosing the accelerator when driving past the demonstrators, to show that they weren’t intimidated. In time, their names, phone numbers, and addresses would all be made public.
    Tiller handed out staff bonuses, which he