Advocates of abortion rights, meanwhile, are reeling from the loss of one of their most experienced and savviest leaders. One of only three doctors in the United States who openly and regularly performed late-term abortions, Dr. Tiller mentored abortion providers across the country. Some of the nation’s most influential women’s groups celebrated him as an American hero.

Image Protesters long tried to close Dr. George R. Tiller's abortion clinic. Credit... Larry W. Smith/Associated Press

“This is so much more than just a murder in Wichita,” said Gloria Allred, a prominent women’s rights lawyer.

A Career Choice

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.

Friends said Dr. Tiller knew he would become a target. Pickets first showed up in 1975, two years after he performed his first abortion. Years later, an anti-abortion group put him on a “wanted” poster of prominent abortion providers and offered $5,000 for information leading to his arrest. When an abortion provider in Florida was assassinated in 1994, Dr. Tiller spent the next few years under the protection of federal marshals. By 1997, he had been labeled “the most infamous abortionist in the United States” by James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family.

“He chose his life,” said Dan Monnat, his longtime lawyer. “And having chosen it, he wasn’t going to complain about the restrictions on his liberty by those who saw it another way.”

Dr. Tiller also accepted that his career would inevitably bring scrutiny of his private life, including his struggle with substance abuse, which resulted in a 1984 arrest for driving under the influence and an agreement with the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts to seek treatment. (He would later serve on the Kansas Medical Society’s impaired physicians committee.)