For activists on both sides of the debate over legalized abortion, the criminal trial of Dr. George Tiller, which begins Monday in a Wichita courtroom, is an oddly unfulfilling culmination of a struggle that has wrenched Kansas for years.
Tiller, 67, is one of a handful of doctors in the country who terminate late-term pregnancies and has virtually become public enemy No. 1 to those who oppose abortion. For years, prosecutors and activists have tried to bring him down, and for years, Tiller has survived legal and physical challenges.
In 1986, his clinic was bombed. In 1991, it was blockaded for six weeks. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by an abortion opponent. He has been investigated twice by grand juries that have found no cause to charge him with crimes.
Relentlessly pursued by then-Kansas Atty. Gen. Phill Kline, a Republican, Tiller was charged in 2006 with illegally performing late-term abortions. The charges were dropped because of a technicality about jurisdiction.
But Kline was a lame duck by the time he filed the charges against Tiller. A month earlier, Kansas voters, tired of what they perceived as Kline's intrusiveness -- which included a successful years-long fight to obtain some of Tiller's patient records -- turned him out of office in favor of Democrat Paul Morrison, who supports abortion rights. The campaign against Kline included direct mail attacks characterizing him as "the Snoop Dog."
The following year, to the delight of abortion foes, Morrison charged Tiller with 19 misdemeanor counts of violating a technical aspect of the 1998 Kansas law that regulates late-term abortions.
The law states that any physician who performs an abortion at or after 22 weeks' gestation must determine whether the fetus is viable -- that is, whether it could survive outside the womb. If the fetus is determined to be viable, then two doctors must certify that continuing the pregnancy might kill the mother or cause "substantial and irreversible" harm to a "major bodily function." The two doctors must have no financial or legal relationship, the law states.
Though neither side will discuss the evidence, the state is expected to contend that Tiller's relationship with Ann Kristin Neuhaus, the second doctor who signed off on the 19 abortions in question, violated the physician independence provision. Each count carries a maximum penalty of up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
