The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion - Hardcover

Stephen Singular is a New York Times bestselling author and Edgar Award nominee. His book Talked to Death was made into the Oliver Stone film Talk Radio. Singular has appeared on Larry King Live, Good Morning America, Court TV, and Anderson Cooper 360.

What George Tiller remembered most about his father, he once said, was the admiration and respect, even love, he had received as a community physician. Born in Wichita in 1941, George spent his boyhood tagging along with his dad, Jack, who served patients around town or at his office near East Kellogg Street, a major business artery running through the city. The youngster liked to carry Dr. Tiller's black bag and watch him practice medicine, not just with instruments and pills, but with the manner and words required for someone who was ill or nearing death. His father had a general medical practice, delivering babies, performing major surgeries, and treating people with heart attacks and strokes.

"There was a very special and unique and very warm, close relationship between my father and his patients," Tiller recalled. "I liked that. I continued to see this doctor/patient relationship through high school and through college, and I decided that's what I wanted to do."

What could be better than making a living helping people who really needed you and playing a vital role in the health of your community? As a teenager, George swam competitively and played other sports, but he never lost his early ambition to enter medicine. After high school, he attended the University of Kansas in Lawrence on a swimming scholarship and earned the nickname "Tuna," while taking a degree in zoology. Following his graduation from the KU School of Medicine, he wanted to set up a practice in dermatology. It was a safe, lucrative, and fairly predictable field; dermatologists rarely got called into emergency rooms or worked late at night. George had been raised to pursue a secure career and taught the conservative Republican values of his family. After getting his MD, he joined the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute Flight Surgeon School and was on a tour of duty as a surgeon in 1970 the day the call came in.

His father, a trained pilot, was flying his family to British Columbia in a small turboprop airplane, when the craft smashed into a hillside in Yellowstone National Park. George's father, mother, sister, and brother-in-law were all killed. The Navy gave the young doctor a humanitarian discharge and he and his wife, Jeanne, returned to Wichita to take care of his ailing grandmother and to adopt his deceased sister's one-year-old son. With these affairs in order, he stopped by one morning at the office where his father had worked for decades, now kept open by nurses.

"On September 21, 1970," he recollected, "I spent my first day in my dad's office, and there were just dozens of people flooding in there. They said, 'You've got to stay and take care of us. There's nobody else to take care of us.' At that time, there was competition for physicians, not competition for patients. So there was nobody else to absorb this practice."

While agreeing to treat them, he explained that this was only a temporary arrangement. He'd stay for a year at the most, before moving on and pursuing his dermatology career probably outside of Kansas. But the patients kept coming, urging him not to shut down. They admired and respected him, just as they had his father, and he was becoming attached to them. He liked the routine of going to work at this familiar office each day and having a general practice--a year passed and he didn't leave Wichita. He was delivering babies and taking care of stroke patients, heart attack victims, and those with diabetes. To his surprise, he was drawn to family medicine because, he said, people "depended on you for their health care, not only for themselves, but for the rest of their families--their grandmothers and grandfathers. And being a member of that extended family, for the health care provider, was fascinating and engaging. It was exactly what I wanted to do."

As his female patients grew more comfortable with him, they shared stories and medical secrets. Back in the 1950s, women in Wichita had started coming to his father for abortions and Jack Tiller had performed them, at a time when this was illegal and dangerous for a physician. He'd taken the risk after refusing to help a patient who'd later died during her botched attempt to end her pregnancy through an unqualified abortionist. Very quietly, he'd become the local, healthy alternative to backstreet abortions; as his underground reputation spread, so did the gratitude women around town felt for him.

George Tiller had been practicing medicine for several years when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, making abortion legal. The patient and her doctor were now the sole decision makers regarding pregnancy. With the law in place, a new generation of females approached Dr. Tiller and asked him to carry on his father's practice. He begged off: this wasn't his mission or, for that matter, what he'd been trained to do. Still they kept asking. Some were desperate for help and others reminded him of the woman who'd died after his father had refused her treatment, their stories building up and carrying an emotional impact. Eventually, he said yes, and his immersion into this nearly unmapped medical field began. Unwanted pregnancies were a far more complex medical, and social, challenge than he'd ever realized.

Many years later, Tiller told the Feminist Majority Foundation about his early years in his profession:

"One of the first people who taught me about the devastation that can occur in a family as a result of alcoholism, drug addiction was Haddie Mueller. She's been dead for about thirty years now. But she was one of my father's patients, and she did have three terminations of pregnancy before it was legal. And she explained all of those things to me. She explained about poverty, and she explained about abuse, and she explained about alcoholism and drug addiction and how it impacted negatively the family. So, I am a woman-educated physician in every aspect of my understanding about abortion and about responsibility of women in the family, both socially and financially."

After performing his first few abortions at a prominent nearby hospital, Wesley Medical Center, Tiller learned he was good at this work. He found it to be an important service, and very rewarding to help women go through what was usually a traumatic experience, both before and after their operations.

If he was kind with his patients, he could be demanding of his staff and a bit vain, especially when he was drinking. No one at work was allowed to call him "George," only "Doctor Tiller." He drove a red Corvette he named Igor and wore a full-length mink coat around Wichita. He was curt with the nurses and assistants whom he felt were less than diligent. More than once he was heard shouting in the Wesley hallways at someone who wanted to cut a procedural corner or go home early. Medicine, he reminded them brusquely, wasn't a nine-to-five job, but a calling.

Like his father, he was learning things he'd never been taught in medical school. He was known for repeating a series of pet sayings, and two of them were:

"The woman's body is smarter than the doctor."

"I want to make the world better, one woman at a time."

Occasionally, after a patient's operation, he and his wife invited her into his home to recuperate. Some stayed for weeks. He expected other medical personnel to treat the women as he did, and his feelings became stronger as his practice expanded, and the controversy around his work grew. You were either loyal to him and his staff--"Team Tiller"--or you didn't belong in his clinic. He began recruiting and hiring mostly females, who called themselves "the sisterhood," and their mission was larger than abortion.

"We have made higher education [for some women] possible," he once said. "We have helped correct some of the results of rape and incest. We have helped battered women escape...