Word: tiller
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...length, though. Some places, like some people, seem to relish any sort of attention. Not this place. No one even slowed while passing the TV trucks at the courthouse, and Mayor Carl Brewer looked queasy when I stopped him outside a city-council meeting. Not a word about Tiller, the mayor insisted. He warmed up only when asked about job losses in the city's storied but stricken aircraft industry...
...slain in the foyer as Sunday services were starting, antiabortion protesters held Sunday vigils. Men stretched their sport coats to cover their children's eyes as they passed gruesome posters of dismembered fetuses on their way into Sunday school. And yet, according to one parishioner, the congregation never discussed Tiller's membership, one way or the other...
When Dr. George Tiller, the U.S.'s best-known provider of late-term abortions, was shot in the head on the morning of May 31 while serving as an usher at his Lutheran church in Wichita, Kans., both sides of the abortion debate braced for battle. Supporters called him a martyr; critics called him a murderer. Both groups deplored his killing: abortion-rights activists warned that it could signal a fresh wave of clinic violence; abortion opponents warned that it would lead to the demonizing of their movement...
...Tiller, who had originally planned to become a dermatologist, lived with the knowledge that his actions made him a target. There are only a handful of clinics in the country where women can obtain an abortion late in pregnancy; Tiller's was bombed in 1986. In 1993 he was shot in both arms. He received death threats regularly, wore body armor and traveled with a guard dog. Just a few weeks ago, the clinic's security cameras and lights were vandalized; Tiller asked the FBI to investigate. He was repeatedly tried--and recently acquitted--on charges of violating state laws...
...abortion debate typically occurs within the boundaries a democracy sets, ones of peaceful, if not always respectful, debate and advocacy on both sides. But Tiller's murder reminds us that in matters of life and death, the argument itself can become a matter of life and death...