Kansas Abortion Practice Set to Replace Tiller Clinic
This spring, Julie Burkhart, an abortion-rights advocate who lives in Wichita, is planning to reopen the abortion clinic that occupied this space for decades, setting the stage for a re-emergence of the fiery passions that once made this conservative manufacturing town the center of the abortion battle in the United States.
Ms. Burkhart was a colleague and close friend of Dr. George R. Tiller, the clinic’s proprietor, who was fatally shot in church by an anti-abortion advocate in 2009 and whom abortion opponents viewed as enemy No. 1 in part because he performed late-term abortions. His clinic, the state’s only abortion provider outside the Kansas City area, has been shut ever since.