It’s been nearly two months since George Tiller was murdered, and I still feel the shock of that assassination keenly. The most emotion-driven (albeit also — I’d like to think — reason-and-theology-informed) post I’ve written in 2009 was in response to the killing.
There’s a great piece in the new summer issue of Ms.Magazine about Dr. Tiller, and an extended excerpt is online. Here’s how it finishes:
“The last time I talked to him,” says (Tiller’s friend) Susan Hill, “I said, ‘Why are you still doing this, George? You certainly don’t need to. Why don’t you just retire, enjoy life?’
“He said, ‘I can’t, I can’t leave these women. There’s no one else for them.’”
“When I found out about the murder,” says Miriam Kleiman, “I just kept hugging and kissing my boys and telling them I loved them.” Her 8-year-old asked, “Mommy, why do you keep crying?”
“And I said, ‘There was a man who helped us about Junior’”—the family’s name for the son whose life was unsustainable. “Someone killed that man, and I’m sad.” Later, her son saw a headline and a photo of Tiller in the newspaper and asked, “Mommy, was that your friend?”
“At whatever level,” says Kleiman, emotion welling up again, “my son got it.”
I liked that bit about Kleiman embracing her sons, born after a previous, hopeless pregnancy was ended in Dr. Tiller’s office. I wanted to hug my daughter a lot (even more than normal) on the day Dr. Tiller died. In 2009, for the first time in my life, I watched a woman I love give birth to our child; in 2009, my feminism has become even more personal as the consequence of now having a daughter (as well as a wife, sisters, a mother, and many other wonderful women in my life.) Dr. Tiller wasn’t just a physician who provided a full range of reproductive care, he was a feminist who, as is now well-known, abided by a simple motto: “Trust Women.”
One reason I’m a feminist is that I do trust women. And one reason I admire Dr. Tiller, and continue to be so moved by his life and so troubled by his murder is because in his life and in his ministry (there is no other word as adequate) he embodied what it meant to be a man who believed in women. Going back to John Stuart Mill and Frederick Douglass, there have been men who believed in women’s rights and were willing to fight to see those rights acquired. But very few male feminists have been martyred; very few male feminists took the risks, the calumny, the hatred of so many in order to continue to do what so few would do and what in so many tragic instances desperately needed doing.
I said it on May 31, the day of his murder: I am Dr. Tiller, and treat me as you would him. And while I certainly have no desire to be shot, I continue to find myself inspired this summer — my first as a father — to live out my feminism more fully and more boldly as a consequence of this gentle, good, Christian, feminist man’s legacy.
Thank you for this gracious post.
Thank you, Hugo. Briefly, we (I) kept trying for that little girl after three fairly easy productions of fabulous boys. The result was two consecutive stillbirths. This was in the days before routine ultrasounds, and information options. George Tiller could well have been my doctor, had I been born later in the last century.
I got knocked off my arrogant high horse in a big way…and nearly 25 years later, I took Dr Tiller’s murder personally, knowing what I know.
Again, thank you.