From LA Times on March 5, 2012:
Dr. Mila Means, a 55-year-old solo family practitioner with neon red hair and neo-hippie style, doesn’t remember how or when she heard that Dr. George Tiller had been gunned down in his church.
She knew him only slightly as their paths crossed in medical circles. Mostly, she knew of him — as the lone abortion provider in a city of nearly 400,000, as a symbol of the country’s abortion wars.
After his killing on May 31, 2009, the decision to step into his place did not come as an epiphany but rather over time, with sad reluctance.
In the past, if her patients with unwanted pregnancies asked where to get an abortion, she sent them to Tiller. After his death, women seeking the procedure increasingly turned to her for advice, often with panicked eyes and voices, asking what to do and where to go.
“I didn’t have an answer,” she said. “I kept thinking one of the OB-GYN doctors would start, but slowly it became apparent no one was going to step up.”
Kansas is a land of great distances. Women who wanted abortions drove hundreds of miles to Kansas City, Tulsa, Denver, even Illinois.
If not her, Means thought, who?
[NB: more people than just cis women need and want access to abortion care.]
(via stfuprolife)
(Source: ForGIFs.com)
World’s most useless machine.
(Source: liquidatomicgonads, via ill-angel)
