It is impressive that Tiller did not mentally buckle under the 18 years of death threats he received. He was already shot in both arms during a murder attempt sixteen years ago. His name was found fifteen years ago on an assassination list. He fortified his clinic with bulletproof class, and traveled with a bodyguard.
The story of his earlier life is also poignant (article):
... his path was altered by a 1970 plane crash that killed his father, mother, sister and brother-in-law.
The former Navy flight surgeon was left with his father's family practice in Wichita, and he soon learned a secret. One of his father's patients asked him whether he, like his father, would perform abortions.
At first, Tiller said, he did not believe his father had risked his medical license by performing then-illegal abortions. But after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortions in 1973, Tiller began providing them.
3 comments:
No reaction... All your readers must be pro-abortion! :D
The #1 most-emailed article in today's Washington Post is by Mary Alice Carr, VP of Communications for NARAL NY, "Why I Turned Down Bill O'Reilly" - http://bit.ly/lbV0E
On the eve of the confirmation hearings for Chief Justice John Roberts (Jan. '06), I remember reading an op-ed in the Boston Globe (which I googled & excerpted below):
Is Roe v. Wade Already Collapsing?
by Ellen Goodman
SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota -- To know what's at stake in the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, it's best to travel 1,200 miles west from the paneled Senate room to a small nondescript clinic in a Great Plains state.
It's best to turn from the blue-and-white charts brandished by senators to the parking lot filled with cars from places as far away as Rapid City or even Wyoming. It's best to turn from the buzz about precedents and privacy to the quiet of a waiting room.
Here, late in the afternoon, the clinic is still full. There's a soldier who will make a 700-mile round trip from the western part of the state. There's a teenager slouching beside a tense mother. There's a rancher, a mother of two high-schoolers and pregnant after having an IUD removed.
This is the only clinic in the state and this is the only day in the week when a woman can get an abortion in South Dakota. Today, they'll be treated by one of four doctors flown in from Minneapolis because it's impossible to recruit locally. Today's doctor is Miriam McCreary, a mother of four and grandmother of nine, who graduated from medical school in 1958. At 70, she still knows ''how desperate women are to end their pregnancies."
One clinic, one day, one doctor. This is what it's like in South Dakota right now under Roe v. Wade. It's also like this in North Dakota and Mississippi, and not very different in Arkansas or a dozen other states...."
You're right. It is impressive that he did not buckle after 18 years of death threats.....Well.....except for that last one of course. :)
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