Women's Health Care Services

Dr. George Tiller, the son of a doctor, studied to be a dermatologist at the University of Kansas. However, after a horrific plane crash that took both of his parents and his sister, Tiller was pressured to take over his father’s clinic, Women’s Health Care. Women’s Health Care Clinic, among other things, provided abortions to women. Tiller was skeptical at first, but after hearing of all the illegal abortions his father had done to help women with nowhere else to go, he felt he needed to help.  Tiller took over the clinic and by the late 1970s, focused the clinic solely on performing abortions.

This clinic provided late term-abortions to women all over the country and the world who struggled to find anyone else to legally perform their abortion.  A late-term abortion generally means following the first trimester, and is more controversial among pro-life advocates, partially due to the vague laws surrounding it. In Kansas, the law prohibits abortions on fetuses that could live outside the womb, unless two doctors certify that having the baby would cause the woman "substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” [1]. Over the 30+ years of Tiller performing abortions, this was the reason he most often cited.  

As one of only three physicians in the United States that performed late-term abortions at the time of his death in 2009, Tiller was often the target of anti-abortion protests and violence. In June, 1986, Women’s Health Care clinic was firebombed by anti-abortion proponents. In the
summer of 1991, dubbed “The Summer of Mercy”, hundreds blocked the entrance to his clinic for several weeks, leading to federal troops being summoned and hundreds of arrests [1]. In August, 1993, Tiller was shot five times in both arms by a woman who was an active member of pro-life organizations. However, none of this deterred Tiller, who came back to work each day, even with a sign outside his clinic after being shot defiantly reading "WOMEN NEED ABORTIONS, AND I AM GOING DO THEM" [2].