A Death in Wichita Read online

  The late-term patients came to the clinic on Monday mornings and were shown a video of Dr. Tiller describing what they were about to experience. Then he took them through a group therapy session based on one offered by Alcoholics Anonymous. Some women openly talked about what had brought them to WHCS, while others sat quietly and listened or gave in to their feelings of pain and fear. On Tuesday, the patients came back to the clinic, where their fetuses were usually injected with digoxin and within a few hours were dead. The women were counseled again about what they’d just done, and then their cervixes were dilated so they could begin the process of miscarrying. After they’d started labor during the next several days, they went back to WHCS and discharged the fetus. Occasionally, patients wanted photos taken of their babies or to have them baptized by the resident chaplain or to be buried in tiny caskets. Others were cremated. WHCS accommodated their wishes and did whatever made the women most comfortable.

  By the time Dr. Hern had opened the first private abortion clinic in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975, he was a veteran of political struggles. He and Tiller became close friends through their shared profession, despite their many differences. Tiller embodied Midwestern politeness and tried to avoid controversy, even if that wasn’t possible for someone in his position. Hern’s natural inclination was to fight the battle head-on.

  “If George took Saint Francis of Assisi for his role model as a doctor,” says Hern, “I took Machiavelli. If I have to choose between being loved and being feared, I’ll take being feared because that can be more effective. George would go outside on a cold day at his clinic and offer the abortion protesters standing there some hot cider. I’d do the same thing, but put laxative in their drinks.”

  The men also worked in opposing environments. Wichita was conservative, with a huge Republican and Christian base. Boulder was known for its diversity and its own brand of political awareness. Women’s rights were supported inside the city limits and at the University of Colorado, which would make a difference in the coming abortion war. When Hern first went to work in Boulder, a local group calling itself the Fight the Abortion Clinic Committee demanded that the city council shut down the clinic because it was “a clear and present danger” to community health. The clinic was only a block away from a public high school and a Catholic school and Hern was “corrupting the youth” of Boulder. The Colorado Board of Health backed Hern, as did the Boulder County Medical Society and Boulder Community Hospital medical staff. Now that he could legally perform abortions, his problems really began.

  First he was picketed. Then the Boulder Valley Right-to-Life Committee sent out lurid anti-abortion brochures to every household in the county. Then came the late-night calls and threats to his home. He bought a rifle and kept it by his bed. Then came the calls of “murderer” each morning when he arrived at his office. Unlike Tiller, who remained silent and attempted to avoid the spotlight, Hern spoke out at abortion rallies, finding it “exhilarating” to shout over the protesters. He produced a steady outpouring of written materials, published everywhere from The Colorado Statesman to The New York Times, and they provided a running history of the abortion movement from someone on the front lines. By the mid-1970s, he’d drawn the condemnation of the Catholic Church.

  In an editorial in The Denver Post in 1975, Father Virgil Blum wrote, “Have Dr. Hern and his profession grown so callous, has the mass of abortions, the literally millions of deaths, benumbed their sense of proportion to such that they can no longer ask, ‘What is it that we are doing?’…The German program of mass euthanasia began with simple steps, backed by the intelligentsia and medical profession: the idea of useless lives…the convenience of society over the sanctity of human life; and once that sanctity was lost, once human life was held to be of relative value, there really could be no limit.”

  In the pages of the Post, Hern took on Father Blum and his church. He called out the priest for writing about “‘Dr. Hern’s enthusiastic applause for abortion.’ I do not applaud fear, ignorance, unwanted pregnancy, or abortion. I take no cheer from human tragedy, no warmth from another’s discomfort. These are difficult, painful problems which can be met with understanding, care, love, competence and a forthright willingness to help people do what they feel is best for themselves and their future…Those who have treated women near death from illegal abortion know that the alternatives to safe legal abortion are very unsatisfactory, indeed. We can deal with the world as it is or we can attempt to deal with it as it never will be. If we choose the latter course, who pays the price of our delusion?”

  The seventies were mere prelude for the looming abortion war. On November 5, 1980, one day after his election, President Ronald Reagan held his first press conference, announcing that he intended to “make abortion illegal.” Two days after that, Senator Strom Thurmond appeared on The Today Show and said that he’d seek the death penalty for abortion doctors. Ten weeks later, following his inauguration, Reagan invited leaders of the anti-abortion movement into the Oval Office and asked them what they all hoped to accomplish together. On Inauguration Day, the new secretary of health and human services, Richard Schweiker, spoke at an anti-abortion rally and said that he represented a “pro-life” administration. Reagan then instituted a “gag rule,” declaring that workers at family planning clinics receiving federal funds could not speak to women about abortion, even if their lives were in danger from pregnancy. The president also opposed sex education and stem cell research.

  “After [Reagan] took office,” wrote Dr. Hern, “and lent the power of the Presidency to the anti-abortion fanatics, the violent attacks on clinics increased dramatically. Threats on my life and harassment of all kinds increased.”

  Between 1977 and 1981, there were 69 violent or aggressive incidents against abortion clinics. From 1981 to 1988, 780 violent or aggressive acts were reported against these medical offices. In 1988 Reverend Pat Robertson ran for president, and on the campaign trail in New Hampshire he said that Planned Parenthood, a consistent supporter of women’s rights, was using abortion to develop a “master race.”

  The day after he made this statement, five shots from a high-powered rifle were fired through the front windows and into the waiting room of Dr. Hern’s clinic, just missing an employee. The physician immediately called a press conference and offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the shooter.

  IV

  In 1986, Dr. Tiller’s office was anonymously pipe-bombed, affecting about two-thirds of the building. Nobody was hurt, but the explosion caused $100,000 in damages. Instead of rethinking his abortion practice or taking a vacation to get away from the destruction, Tiller (like Hern) became more resolute and defiant, now advertising his services nationwide. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, mop haircut, bland expression, and efforts to maintain his politeness, he was fierce in his convictions. Three days after the bombing, he planted a sign outside his office.

  “Hell no!” it proclaimed. “We won’t go!”

  He put up $10,000 as a reward, but nobody ever collected on it. He installed gates, fencing, floodlights, metal detectors, and bulletproof glass.

  “And I said, ‘No, this stuff isn’t going to happen again in Wichita,’” he recalled years later. “Well, I was wrong. We began to have people arrested outside our office. The clinic was blocked. People couldn’t get in. Federal marshals finally had to take over. After six weeks, they had to take over the clinic. And things got back to relatively normal.”

  He wore a bulletproof vest to work, bought an armored SUV to get to and from the office (costing another $100,000), varied his route to the clinic, drove in the right-hand lane, and brought armed guards onto his staff. He hired high-powered attorneys and began donating money to the state’s top-ranking pro-choice politicians, eventually forming a political action committee that he named ProKanDo. Yet he did little in the realm of public relations, even when abortion foes put up billboards and “wanted” posters of him around town asking, “Is Tiller Above the Law?” On
e heard grumbling in Wichita, from his own supporters, that he didn’t do enough to promote himself in the community or media, or enough to let the city and region know that he didn’t just perform abortions.

  When patients were referred to Tiller by physicians nationwide, they were fully questioned by his staff to determine if they truly wanted to end their pregnancies. His clinic had seen hundreds of cases where potential patients had been screened and the women had changed their minds. Tiller helped these mothers put their babies up for adoption, but only if the newborns were going to a pro-choice family. He didn’t publicize this adoption service or that nearly every day he confronted extreme medical problems with women who had nowhere else to go.

  “The wife of one of my closest friends got pregnant,” says the Wichita native and author Robert Beattie, “and there were serious complications. They went in to see Dr. Tiller and learned that their baby wasn’t developing a head. They needed to abort the fetus, and as they walked into his clinic, protesters came up and screamed at them, calling them murderers and baby killers.”

  Tiller was much less concerned with Wichita’s perception of him than with the science being developed inside Women’s Health Care Services, and with keeping up morale at the office. He wasn’t the only one targeted by anti-abortion activists. Pictures of his employees were hung on telephone poles, next to images of aborted fetuses. Abortion foes got the home addresses of his staff and rode through their neighborhoods with bullhorns, denouncing Tiller and those who worked for him. Each weekday morning, employees attempted to ignore the verbal abuse from protesters greeting them at WHCS. Some had their own brand of defiance, goosing the accelerator when driving past the demonstrators, to show that they weren’t intimidated. In time, their names, phone numbers, and addresses would all be made public.

  Tiller handed out staff bonuses, which he called “combat pay.” He gave pep talks and passed around buttons that read, “Attitude Is Everything.” He created plaques for the “Freedom Fighters” who worked at WHCS.

  “The only requirement for evil to triumph,” he told them, “is for good people to do nothing.”

  The protesters sent pregnant women into Tiller’s office “under cover.” Their job was to look for and find evidence that WHCS had violated some procedure or law—anything that could be used against Tiller in court and cause him to lose his medical license. When that failed, they harassed and boycotted the vendors who showed up at the office—an effective ploy, because these businesses didn’t want to end up on an anti-abortion flyer or, in later years, on a Web site. Tiller’s employees could no longer get a pizza or a bouquet of flowers delivered at work, and even one garbage pick-up service refused to come to WHCS.

  In spite of the constant verbal abuse and almost a thousand clinic bombings that occurred throughout the United States in the 1980s and early ’90s, somehow no human beings were physically harmed. Animals were a different matter.

  Dr. LeRoy Carhart, a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a Republican like Tiller, was one of three abortion providers in Nebraska. On September 6, 1991, the state legislature passed the Nebraska Parental Notification Law, making it mandatory for minors to tell parents or guardians if they intended to get an abortion. That same day arsonists set fire to Carhart’s home, barn, two other buildings, and his vehicles, killing a pair of family pets and seventeen horses. No one was ever prosecuted for the fire, but the next morning Carhart received a note claiming responsibility for the destruction and comparing the deaths of the animals to the “murder of children.” Like Tiller and Hern, Carhart was not easily intimidated. Before the fire, his surgical practice had not focused on abortion—now he began doing them full-time. He’d eventually travel to Wichita and work every third week in Tiller’s clinic.

  If the doctors themselves escaped physical harm, it may have been because of a sense, among abortion opponents, that legal abortion’s days were numbered. In 1988, Randall Terry had started Operation Rescue, an innovative and aggressive anti-abortion group which conducted a number of successful demonstrations at that summer’s Democratic Convention in Atlanta. These helped bolster their fund-raising, giving hope to pro-lifers. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, they assumed, would work to overturn Roe v. Wade. And finally, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, about to be succeeded by another anti-abortion Republican: George H.W. Bush.

  The best days for the anti-abortion movement were just ahead.

  V

  By the start of the 1990s, Scott Roeder and his anti-government friends in Kansas City were one piece of a growing ideological rebellion in America that still remained on the fringes. Some opposed abortion, others vilified homosexuality, and still others were against the mixing of the races. Many evangelicals believed that the human race was in its “Last Days,” the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and when He arrived, the nations of the world would be swept away in a cleansing fire. Those who’d already achieved salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus would ascend to heaven, while everyone else would be left behind in the mass destruction of earth. These rebellious segments touched one another and shared certain views, and that closeness would only increase with the arrival of the Internet.

  The apocalyptic visionaries and prophets of doom usually had several beliefs in common: America had gone tragically awry with the sexual and racial liberation movements of the 1960s; our state and federal governments not only couldn’t be trusted to fix the country, but were major problems themselves; evil had been set loose within the nation and was spreading throughout schools, churches, and other public institutions. Evil was a tangible force—embodied by gay men and women, by those on spiritual paths different from fundamentalist Christianity, by people embracing liberal or progressive politics, and by abortion doctors or women who wanted to control their own reproduction. Because evil was a concrete thing and some individuals so clearly represented it, they should be removed by any means necessary.

  None of this, of course, was entirely new. Coming of age in rural Kansas in the 1950s and ’60s, I remember the prevailing racism: the unwritten law in our small town was “No niggers inside the city limits after sundown.” At fifteen, I worked at my father’s lumberyard alongside truckers, carpenters, farmers, and hired hands. One summer afternoon, an older employee and I made a delivery out into the countryside and detoured to a large white farmhouse at the base of a valley, surrounded by cottonwood trees. A rough-looking, uneducated man thirty years my senior, he went into the house and came back half an hour later, explaining to me that he’d been meeting with other “Minutemen,” a white supremacist vigilante group on alert in case of a race riot or some other uprising in Kansas City or Topeka. His group was well armed and prepared for battle.

  My father had been a bombardier pilot in World War Two a few years before I was born. His plane was shot down over Europe, instantly killing three of the nine crew members, but he parachuted out, was picked up by German soldiers, and was transported in a wheelbarrow to a prison camp. For about a year in 1944–45, he was a POW under the Nazis. As a boy, I tried asking him questions about the war, things like “Why would a whole country go crazy and act the way Germany did? How could the Nazis do those things to Jews? Why didn’t somebody stop them?” He wouldn’t respond, but just get up and leave the room. World War Two was over for him and should be left in the past—a very Midwestern response to painful memories—yet parts of the war were still visible in our home. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking, he couldn’t sleep, and he was constantly hungry and claustrophobic, flailing his arms in the backseat of a car hard enough to hurt another passenger.

  He’d never hated regular German citizens, he once told me, and hadn’t taken any pleasure in dropping bombs on them. It was a brutal job that had to be done to put down a worldwide scourge, and once it was finished he wanted it behind him. My father refused to talk about his POW experience, so I stopped probing him, but that only made me more curious.<
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  For my part, I tried to keep at bay the racism and religious bigotry around me, and to escape my father’s highly visible anxiety, by burying myself in music, specifically black music, the soundtrack of my life. The jazz and blues of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown convinced me that the “Minutemen” were wrong, when almost nothing else in my environment did. Blacks may not have been allowed in town after sunset, but nighttime radio signals reached into my bedroom from Chicago and Denver, from Canada and New Orleans, and those blue notes hinted at a much larger world not so shaped by anger and fear. That essential conflict—between love for family and shame for the sins of my culture—couldn’t be reconciled, but the music was a window into something that offered hope.

  In my twenties, I moved to New York City, where I became a journalist and an avid student of the conditions that had created the Third Reich. At age thirty, I moved from New York to Denver, and on the day I arrived in September 1981, the week of Yom Kippur, I heard a Jewish radio talk show host demanding on the air that listeners call in and talk about their hidden, or not-so-hidden, anti-Semitism; maybe speaking openly about these things would help release uncomfortable feelings and get rid of some of the prejudice. Hearing this man on radio for the first time was haunting for me and that experience would only grow in future years. A wildly provocative ex-lawyer and ex-alcoholic from Chicago, Alan Berg and talk radio were just starting to explode throughout the country. As he became more popular, white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups were studying a blood-soaked manifesto called The Turner Diaries, a fantasy novel about a white power revolution—led by a cell known as the Order—that rolled across the United States and purged the nation of minorities, gays, feminists, liberal judges, physicians who gave women abortions, and Jews.