George Tiller

The late doctor was a far more formidable foe than anti-abortionists ever thought possible.

This part of his biography is interesting, I think:

Dr. Tiller’s career in abortion began with family tragedy.

In August 1970, his parents, sister and sister’s husband were killed when the small private plane his father was piloting crashed near Yellowstone National Park. Dr. Tiller, who had carried his father’s bag on house calls as a boy, left the Navy and returned home to care for his grandparents and wind down his father’s family practice. He and his wife, Jeanne, adopted his sister’s baby son, and he talked of settling into life as a dermatologist.

But he discovered his father had been performing significant numbers of illegal abortions, and before long women began turning to him for abortions, too, often under desperate circumstances. “The women taught him about life in Wichita,” said Linda Stoner, who worked for Dr. Tiller for a decade. The more skilled he became, the more referrals he got, the more he undercut prices of competitors, the more he began to specialize in abortion, making it the main focus of his practice by the late 1970s.