Sunday night was when I first found out abortionist Dr. George Tiller had been murdered. But unlike Elizabeth Weil, I knew exactly who he was. I grew up in a conservative Christian family: loving my dad's lapel pin of tiny baby feet, dropping change in baby bottles to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers, and keeping up with relevant legislation. My family and I are probably a pretty good representation of 99 percent of the pro-life movement—people who wouldn't sabotage a clinic or use violence to stop abortion, but do our best with community involvement, prayer, and our votes. So I knew who Tiller was. I've prayed for him before.

I was following the lead-up to his trial for 19 misdemeanor counts all through March. Updates hit my inbox in a bizarre parallel track to another set of breathless updates from friends. Their baby daughter was born by emergency cesarean-section three entire months early and whose survival was an open question. Everyone was pulling for her to make it—doctors, nurses, friends, relatives, co-workers. It's a strange world we live in, to get those updates and then to read about tiny babies just about the same age that hadn't had that kind of cheerleading, who had first been held in Dr. Tiller's arms instead of their parents'.

To me, all the stories of Dr. Tiller's work raise one big question, "What's life for?" Is it just to be happy and have a good quality of life? And if it is, then who gets to set that bar for us—our parents, our laws, or our faith?

I came across one answer this week from my friend Erin, just back on Monday from a trip to Uganda. You can read the whole story here, but Erin writes,

I have to tell you about a brother and sister named Kevin and Catherine. He is 24. She is 21. Their parents died and left them as orphans. Kevin received a full scholarship to attend Liberty University in Virginia and has just graduated and is coming back to Uganda on Monday. Three years ago, Kevin looked around and realized that there were other orphans that needed care, so he and his sister began to take them in. At age 18, Catherine had become a mother to these children and their head caretaker, as Kevin returned to Liberty to study. Over the past three years, the number of orphans has reached a total of 68. The ages range from 3 months up to the lower teens. Catherine, a child herself, is now mother to 68! The only income they receive is from the part-time job that Kevin has at school, which he balances with being a full-time student. This brother and sister decided together that they would give their lives to these 68 children until they are grown and can provide for themselves. Their courage is a great challenge to me.

The children only get to eat once a day, around 3 or 4 p.m. Catherine serves them tea in the morning to hold them over until then, and then lets them play in the afternoon until bed, in hopes that they will fall asleep before they realize their hunger pains and ask her for more.

For $100 we were able to buy a wide variety of food for all of the children and give them a meal that would nourish their little bodies. Catherine, knowing each child intimately, cried throughout the meal because she couldn’t remember the last time she saw them enjoy eating so much."

So I don't know what defines happiness for you, or for a baby with serious medical problems, or for the parents of those kids. But for me, I know that whatever my definition of happiness is now, I hope it can grow someday to be as life-changing and life-giving as Kevin and Catherine's.

Tags: abortion, George Tiller, late-term abortion, pro-life

Another friend describes his wife's late-term abortion. Read testimonials from Tiller's patients here.

I did not know Dr. Tiller, but his assassination vividly reminds me of events in 1983, when my wife and I had a devasting experience with a late-term pregnancy gone wrong at 38 weeks. We had a daughter (I will call her that—in our case, the distinction between fetus and child was not relevant) who developed hydrocephalus (water on the brain) late in the pregnancy, which was discovered at the last ultrasound. Her head was huge with fluid, and therefore would not fit through the birth canal. Actually, it was called hydroencephaly, meaning that she essentially had no brain, because it had been substantially dissolved by the neural fluid from a spinal cord that had not properly closed. Because of the head size, we learned that my wife would have to have a caesarian to deliver the baby—although common, a major surgery. My wife had had an ectopic pregnancy, with major surgery that devasted her, but we very much wanted the baby. Yet we learned that even with the caesarian, the baby would either die shortly after birth, or would live somewhat longer, and very, very badly—likely paralyzed, blind, and without significant mental faculties. My brother is a neonatologist, an expert in premature babies and other problems, and he consulted with specialists around the country. Nothing could be done to improve the predicted outcome. We decided to terminate the pregnancy and avoid the caesarian, to preserve my wife's health and increase her chances for another child, and so we wouldn't simultaneously be grieving the child and coping with recovery from surgery. We made that wrenching decision and the pregnancy was terminated at Stanford University, with the baby delivered vaginally after the evacuation of the spinal fluid from her head. This is what was much later termed "partial birth abortion" and villified by politicians and ideologues who have no idea of the reality we experienced. We buried our daughter in a cemetary in Santa Cruz, Calif. We continue to grieve her loss, and we are also grateful to the caring doctors who assisted us in our time of need.

Would that Dr. Tiller's killer, and his allies, had any idea of the nature of the medical disasters for which he offered his help. Would that they cared.

Photograph of pregnant woman by Anna Jurkovska/Shutterstock Images LLC.

Tags: abortion, late-term abortion, Tiller

A second friend recalls her visit to Dr. George Tiller's clinic:

In July 1993, my husband and I received the worst news about our son's impending birth: He suffered from multiple, severe fetal anomalies, both internal and external, thought to be the result of a rare blood disorder. If he could survive his early birth at 24 weeks he most likely would not survive his blood cancer beyond the age of 9.

After several years of trying to conceive our second child, the news could not have been more devastating. When we heard the news, I had been in Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC for more than two weeks, hooked up to a subcutaneous pump delivering a medication to stop contractions. While still reeling from the shock, we were told we could take our chances and let the baby be born, but that the state would be forced to intervene if we did not then take every measure to keep our son alive. Or, we could consider two late-term abortion clinics—one in Wichita, Kan., the other in Holland! Our initial thoughts were "how could we be in a major NYC hospital in the United States and be told these are our only choices?" To say it was surreal is an understatement.

We made the very painful decision to travel to Wichita after many sleepless, tear-filled hours of discussion. The "quality" of life our son would have had, and the effects this birth could have had on our family for years to come, brought us to that difficult road. I could never explain to anyone how it felt to travel six hours with my baby kicking, knowing that I was about to end the life we tried so lovingly to create. While my husband lived this nightmare with me, even he could not understand or experience the depths of despair that I felt. The scars are still there.

My husband and I found Dr. George Tiller to be a caring, sensitive, and compassionate man who truly believed he was helping those of us who were desperate and had nowhere else to go. While we were at his clinic, he was very concerned about an 11-year-old child raped by her stepfather. And, when we were tormented by Operation Rescue protesters outside his clinic, he put on a bullet proof vest and personally drove us out of there while we hid in his van.

You can read other tales from inside Tiller's clinic here and here.

A friend recalls her visit to Dr. George Tiller's clinic. You can read another memory of Dr. Tiller here:

It was horrible. We were driving onto the grounds and the protesters were there with their ugly pictures yelling at us. Just yelling. Then we got inside and it was calm, very professional. Those people are miracle workers, every last one of them, from the littlest nurse to the admin guys. They had to know their lives were in danger, and there was security everywhere, but they just wanted to reassure us.

The baby had contracted a virus and you could see on the MRI that its organs were all messed up. It looked like there were bubbles in them, instead of solid masses like they were supposed to be. Then they figured out that the baby had been exposed to Fifth disease. All sorts of researchers contacted us, because they wanted to study it.

That was at about 20 weeks. I got a blood transfusion and I thought everything was cool. We went on vacation. But then we came back, and the doctor realized everything wasn't cool. His brain had a hemorrhage. The MRI reminded me of my other son's. He's autistic, and when he was three he'd had an MRI that also showed abnormalities. At a minimum, they said the baby would have developmental delays. But the doctor also used the words: "This child could not make it into childhood." I was six months along then, and I was already showing. But we couldn't handle having another special needs kid. Psychically, we just couldn't handle it.

It was definitely not a threat to my life. My doctor sort of indicated that there were other options but he didn't give us any contact info. He basically said we had to go to Wichita, Kan., and we'd be in good hands. It was an unusual environment. There were about 10 of us, with our husbands. We stayed in a hotel with all-night security. They were parents from all over the country, and racially mixed. Some of them definitely could have been Republicans, and Christians. Some wanted to give the fetus a name, and bury it, but I didn't want that. Most of them had babies with Down's Syndrome. They wanted us to go through this together, and in therapy sessions they let us talk about it.

After they injected us with something to kill the fetus, they used some kind of seaweed stick, to make the process more organic, so the body would naturally start to abort the fetus. The whole thing took two or three days. We were all pulling for each other.

There were elections going on at the time, and in my hotel room I remember seeing Sam Brownback, a senator from Kansas, on T.V. giving some big speech, and he kept saying this is a message for Americans and for the "unborn children." And I thought, "this is just horrible." This is a very difficult decision, a very personal decision, and it shouldn't be up for debate in this kind of forum. It seemed totally inappropriate.

I cry all the time, and that will be for the rest of my life. Because I really, really wanted that baby. It's so sad, that no matter what was wrong with it, it was trying to grow, that my body was still trying to make that body grow. It could even have looked like a perfect baby—it probably did look like a perfect baby. So it's just weird and sad that nature is trying to do this thing, and everything is working against it.

You can read other tales from inside Tiller's clinic here and here.

Tags: George Tiller, murder, third trimester abortion