Following is a lengthy article from the New York Times which outlines some
of the key events which ultimately led to the murder of Dr. George R.
Tiller, aka "Tiller the baby killer", on May 31st of this year by Scott
Roeder.

As I have noted before, the murder of Dr. Tiller has left many of us
Christians with complex emotions. On one hand, we must strongly condemn the
fact that for some thirty-five years, Dr. Tiller murdered in cold blood,
literally thousands of unborn children. This fact is made perfectly clear by
the following paragraph taken from the article:

----- Begin Quote -----

When late-term abortions were done, Dr. Tiller typically injected a lethal
drug into the fetus's heart, then induced labor after the heart stopped. The
entire process typically took several days, and many patients have written
tributes about the sensitive care they received.

----- End Quote -----

Just reading that paragraph sickens me. This is nothing short of
cold-blooded murder, and I don't see how any doctor, or any person, could
engage in such a heinous, diabolical crime. How can anyone be so past
feeling?

Yet at the same time, as Christians, neither can we condone the fact that
Scott Roeder took it upon himself to murder Dr. Tiller in cold blood. While
Mr. Roeder's actions have undoubtedly saved some lives, in the long run, his
crime will do more harm to the anti-abortion movement.

Yet, like many of you, I cannot deny the fact that just knowing that Tiller
has finally been stopped, gives me a small degree of relief.

Some people have been suggesting, or at least asking, if God's Will was
fulfilled through Roeder's actions. Was Roder actually God's instrument to
bring judgment upon Dr. Tiller?

I honestly don't know. All I can say is that I personally would never resort
to such an action. As much as I detest abortion, I believe that judgment
lies in God's Hands alone, and nowhere did Jesus or His followers ever teach
us to be killers for any reason whatsoever.

Following is the NYT article in full.


An Abortion Battle, Fought to the Death

By DAVID BARSTOW - NYT

July 25, 2009


WICHITA, Kan. -- It did not take long for anti-abortion leaders to realize
that George R. Tiller was more formidable than other doctors they had tried
to shut down.

Shrewd and resourceful, Dr. Tiller made himself the nation's pre-eminent
abortion practitioner, advertising widely and drawing women to Wichita from
all over with his willingness to perform late-term abortions, hundreds each
year. As anti-abortion activists discovered, he gave as good as he got,
wearing their contempt as a badge of honor. A "warrior," they called him
with grudging respect.

And so for more than 30 years the anti-abortion movement threw everything
into driving Dr. Tiller out of business, certain that his defeat would deal
a devastating blow to the "abortion industry" that has terminated
roughly 50
million pregnancies since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

They blockaded his clinic; campaigned to have him prosecuted; boycotted his
suppliers; tailed him with hidden cameras; branded him "Tiller the baby
killer"; hit him with lawsuits, legislation and regulatory complaints; and
protested relentlessly, even at his church. Some sent flowers pleading for
him to quit. Some sent death threats. One bombed his clinic. Another tried
to kill him in 1993, firing five shots, wounding both arms.

In short, they made George Tiller's clinic the nation's most visible
abortion battleground, a magnet for activists from all corners of the
country.

Dr. Tiller would not budge.

Instead he dug in, pouring his considerable profits into expanding his
clinic and installing security cameras, bulletproof glass, metal detectors,
fencing and floodlights. He hired armed guards, bought a bulletproof vest
and drove an armored S.U.V. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on
some of the state's best lawyers and recruited an intensely loyal staff that
dubbed itself Team Tiller. He lobbied politicians with large donations and
photographs of severely deformed fetuses.

Confident and dryly mischievous, he told friends he had come to see himself
as a general in an epic cultural war to keep abortion legal, to the point of
giving employees plaques designating them "Freedom Fighters." His
willingness to abort fetuses so late in pregnancies put him at the medical
and moral outer limits of abortion. Yet he portrayed those arrayed against
him as religious zealots engaged in a campaign whose aim was nothing less
than to subjugate women.

"If a stake has to be driven through the heart of the anti-abortion
movement," he said, "I want to have my hand on the hammer."

The son of a prominent Wichita physician, married 45 years, the father of 4
and grandfather of 10, a former Navy flight surgeon, a longtime Republican,
Dr. Tiller, 67, insisted that he would not be driven from his hometown,
where he belonged to its oldest country club, was a devoted member of one of
its largest churches, was active in Alcoholics Anonymous, was deeply
involved in his alma mater, the University of Kansas, and adored his local
Dairy Queen.

Indeed, he made a point of performing abortions the day after he was shot in
the arms.

"His is the only abortion clinic we've never been able to close," Troy
Newman, president of Operation Rescue, said in an interview.

Yet what thousands could not achieve in three decades of relentless effort,
a gunman accomplished on May 31 when he shot Dr. Tiller in the head at
point-blank range while the doctor was ushering at church.

Scott Roeder, an abortion foe with the e-mail name "ServantofMessiah,"
awaits trial in the murder. In a jailhouse interview, Mr. Roeder did not
admit guilt but told a reporter that if he is convicted, his motive was to
protect the unborn, a goal seemingly advanced when the Tiller family closed
the clinic.

But in the weeks since the killing, supporters and opponents of Dr. Tiller
have been measuring the larger ramifications. Implacably divided for so
long, they now agree on a fundamental point: Dr. Tiller's death represents
an enormous loss for each side.

Abortion opponents are bracing for a drop in support, especially from those
in the murky middle ground of the debate. Worse yet, after years of
persuading supporters to work within the law, they say they have already
lost credibility among the most ardent abortion opponents who cannot help
pointing out that one gunman achieved what all their protests and prayers
could not.

"The credit is going to go to him," Mark S. Gietzen, chairman of the Kansas
Coalition for Life, said of Mr. Roeder. "There are people who are agreeing
with him."

Advocates of abortion rights, meanwhile, are reeling from the loss of one of
their most experienced and savviest leaders. One of only three doctors in
the United States who openly and regularly performed late-term abortions,
Dr. Tiller mentored abortion providers across the country. Some of the
nation's most influential women's groups celebrated him as an American hero.

"This is so much more than just a murder in Wichita," said Gloria Allred, a
prominent women's rights lawyer.

A Career Choice

Dr. Tiller's career in abortion began with family tragedy.

In August 1970, his parents, sister and sister's husband were killed when
the small private plane his father was piloting crashed near Yellowstone
National Park. Dr. Tiller, who had carried his father's bag on house calls
as a boy, left the Navy and returned home to care for his grandparents and
wind down his father's family practice. He and his wife, Jeanne, adopted his
sister's baby son, and he talked of settling into life as a dermatologist.

But he discovered his father had been performing significant numbers of
illegal abortions, and before long women began turning to him for abortions,
too, often under desperate circumstances. "The women taught him about life
in Wichita," said Linda Stoner, who worked for Dr. Tiller for a decade. The
more skilled he became, the more referrals he got, the more he undercut
prices of competitors, the more he began to specialize in abortion, making
it the main focus of his practice by the late 1970s.

Friends said Dr. Tiller knew he would become a target. Pickets first showed
up in 1975, two years after he performed his first abortion. Years later, an
anti-abortion group put him on a "wanted" poster of prominent abortion
providers and offered $5,000 for information leading to his arrest. When an
abortion provider in Florida was assassinated in 1994, Dr. Tiller spent the
next few years under the protection of federal marshals. By 1997, he had
been labeled "the most infamous abortionist in the United States" by James
C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.

"He chose his life," said Dan Monnat, his longtime lawyer. "And having
chosen it, he wasn't going to complain about the restrictions on his liberty
by those who saw it another way."

Dr. Tiller also accepted that his career would inevitably bring scrutiny of
his private life, including his struggle with substance abuse, which
resulted in a 1984 arrest for driving under the influence and an agreement
with the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts to seek treatment. (He would
later serve on the Kansas Medical Society's impaired physicians committee.)

Still, his family strongly supported his choice. He described his daughters,
two of whom became physicians, coming into his study during one especially
stressful period. "What they said to me was, 'Daddy, if not now, when? If
not you, who?' " he recalled this spring in a court hearing.


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