On Seventh Anniversary of Dr. George Tiller’s Assassination, Anti-Abortion Terrorism Still a Threat
Dr. George Tiller was murdered seven years ago today. He believed in our right to take control of our own destinies. pic.twitter.com/nsilo931YL
— CenterforReproRights (@ReproRights) May 31, 2016
Today is the seventh anniversary of the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was the medical director of Women’s Health Care Services in Wichita, Kansas, one of just three clinics across the nation that at the time provided late-term abortions. When Scott Roeder walked up to the doctor at his church and shot him in the head, it wasn’t the first time Tiller had suffered violence. He had been shot in both arms in 1993, and his clinic was firebombed in 1986. Violence has been a part of the forced-birther movement from early on.
The National Abortion Federation reports eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 181 arsons, and more than 6,000 instances of other forms of violence against abortion clinics and providers since 1977.
For obvious reasons, when someone phones in or otherwise makes a threat against an abortion provider or clinic, it is taken seriously. Some doctors who provide abortions wear bulletproof vests. Tiller often did, although he was not wearing his the morning he was shot. And a vest won’t necessarily protect a doctor who wears it all the time. Dr. Warren Hern is a Colorado physician who has been providing abortions in Boulder since 1974, starting out as the medical director of the Boulder Valley Clinic. It’s the first free-standing abortion clinic in Colorado, which I and 14 others co-founded in 1973, and it’s still operating as the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center. Hern told the Los Angeles Times in 2009 after Tiller was murdered:
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