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November 2005

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Target Wichita

By Eleanor j. Bader
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November 2005
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Troy Newman, founder of Operation Rescue West (ORW), calls Wichita, Kansas “the frontline of the abortion war…the American Auschwitz” and dubs Dr. George Tiller, owner of the Wichita-based Women’s Health Care Services (WHCS), “America’s abortionist.” 

“Tiller specializes in taking the lives of handicapped babies,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Oftentimes the ob-gyn or geneticist does not find out that the baby is impaired until late in the pregnancy. Tiller does the majority of abortions on Down Syndrome babies performed in the U.S. He is one of the few abortionists who will do something so heinous. Other abortionists may do more abortions numerically, but no one does them later than Tiller.” 

Newman’s group has, since early 2004, targeted Women’s Health Care Services and has employed a host of tactics against the facility. “Tiller lives in a gated, highly insular community and you almost never see him,” Newman says. “He is very rich and very insulated, but he does not operate in a vacuum. He can show up at the clinic all he wants, but he needs air conditioning repairpeople, nurses, accountants, bankers, and people to pick up his trash. In a small conservative town like Wichita, in a red state, it is very easy to stigmatize anyone involved in the abortion industry whether they’re individuals or business entities.” 

Julie Burkhart, executive director of a pro-choice political action committee called ProKanDo, works closely with Tiller and clinic staff. “Operation Rescue West hopes to intimidate people into leaving their jobs; they also want to intimidate the businesses the clinic relies on. They believe this will force WHCS to close,” she says. “They’ve gone to the neighborhoods of at least six employees—nurses, front office staff, intake workers—and picketed their homes. At one point they sent postcards to people all over the country with the same last name as a particular worker. The cards had pictures of aborted fetuses on them and said, ‘God said you should not commit murder…. Your neighbor, Sara Phares, participates in the murder of babies like these’.” The cards listed Phares’s home address and telephone number and asked recipients to “let her know you oppose abortion.” Follow-up cards exhorted recipients to “tell Sara Phares to get a life…. Beg her to quit, pretty please.” 

To hear Newman tell it, the campaign has had multiple successes. “It is getting increasingly difficult for Tiller to operate in Wichita,” he says. “He is losing staff. In fact, 11 people have quit in the last 18 months.” 

JoAn Armentrout, the clinic’s administrative director, laughs at this assertion. “We have 13 people on staff, total,” she says. “Three people have quit, but it is simply untrue that they left because of Troy. They left because they wanted to relocate or because a family member got a job transfer. Yes, ORW has gone to people’s houses and sent neighbors mailings with ugly photos on them, but nothing negative has come out of that. To a person, every staff member has gotten good calls from neighbors and the clinic has received supportive calls and letters from community residents. No one has been harassed by anyone outside of ORW. Furthermore, nothing has changed in terms of our relationship with suppliers. Despite pressure on them, none have stopped working with us.” 

Both Armentrout and Burkhart believe that Newman’s inability to persuade staff and suppliers to abandon WHCS has led ORW to shift gears. While a small number of protesters continue to harass patients and staff as they enter and leave the clinic, the mailings and neighborhood pickets have diminished and area businesses report fewer anti-abortion calls and faxes. Instead, ORW has stepped up demonstrations outside Tiller’s Reformation Lutheran church and has increased pressure on the Evangelical Lutheran denomination. 

“For people who profess to be loving Christians, ORW is full of hate and intolerance,” says Burkhart. “One man, Keith Mason, recently moved to Wichita from Colorado; he had been a leader of Survivors Colorado, a group made up of people born after Roe was decided in 1973. Over the summer, Mason sat in a pew behind Tiller a few times and whispered anti- choice rhetoric during the service. He also took a photo of Tiller and his wife taking communion and posted it on ORW’s website. We find that pretty creepy.” 

“We have switched gears slightly,” Troy Newman admits. “We are calling for Tiller’s excommunication. He is an unrepentant sinner and should be thrown out of his church since what he does for a living flies in the face of Christian doctrine. We are bringing pressure to bear from the Christian community at large. It is very disturbing to us that so many denominations— Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians—have embraced the abortion culture and refuse to call abortion a sin.” 

Despite this emphasis, ORW is doing far more than pressuring Reformation Lutherans. Members are at the clinic every day that it is open and take their 20-foot “truth vans”—trucks bearing photos of mangled fetuses with captions like, “Mommy, why did you kill me?”— to places where large numbers of people gather. In recent months they have parked within viewing distance of the Roberts hearings, the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NCAA championship, the NAACP Convention, NASCAR races, and abortion clinics. “No one likes to see pictures of aborted children,” says Newman. “But the photos strip the ambiguity from abortion. It’s not abstract anymore.” 

For their part, clinic staff say that they will continue their work regardless of ORW. “Irritating as it is, we’re able to talk about the antis and laugh about them. We always share the letters of support we receive and tell each other the supportive comments we hear,” says WHCS administrator Armentrout. “And knowing how much we help our patients, well, the fact that we do what we do keeps us going.” 

Nonetheless, Julie Burkhart believes that patients and clinicians, no matter how resolute, need the affirmation of a visible pro-choice community. “Silence has never gotten anybody anywhere,” she says. “Kansans who support reproductive choice tend to do it quietly. There is a lot of fear. The ORW people are bullies. It’s their way or the highway. They don’t respect women. Although this state has a pro-choice community—we raised $260,000 for pro-choice candidates in 2004—people have been beaten into submission. We need to remember that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Right now the antis are the squeaky wheel. It’s unfortunate that people in Wichita are not more vocal about their outrage.”

Eleanor Bader is a freelance writer and co-author of Targets of Hatred. 
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