Anti-abortion groups responded by trying, unsuccessfully, to get the local planning commission to rezone the site to keep out medical services, and by filing bogus complaints with building inspectors and fire marshals in an effort to shut down renovations. The harassers even filed a complaint with the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the state body that regulates medical providers, alleging the illegal practice of medicine when the clinic was not even open.

Ms. Burkhart’s own home has been picketed twice in the last few months. The second time, she saw a sign pointed at her house that said, “Where’s your church?” — a reference, which she found “incredibly frightening,” to Dr. Tiller’s murder at his church. She has obtained a temporary protection order against the fanatic who led the picketing, and she is seeking a permanent one. There is now tighter security at her home and the clinic, she says.

The South Wind clinic is to be staffed by three doctors whose names have been withheld to help protect their safety. Only one of them lives in Kansas. The other two will be flying in from out of state, emulating the practice in several other states, like Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota, where doctors’ fears about personal safety and being ostracized in their communities, combined with a shortage of physicians with training in abortion care, make it necessary to import doctors.

Special precautions are planned for transporting the doctors to and from the airport. Recently, one of the doctors who will be commuting from another state to work at South Wind received a harassing phone call from Troy Newman, head of the extremist anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. Mr. Newman got through by posing as a reporter and then posted his surreptitious recording of the conversation on the organization’s Web site, along with the physician’s name. “I was terrified for a while,” says the doctor, who remains committed to the Wichita job.

Two weeks ago, David Leach, from another radical group, Army of God, posted on YouTube a chilling recording of his recent jailhouse conversation with Scott Roeder, the convicted murderer of Dr. Tiller, in which both men seemed to suggest that some like-minded anti-abortion terrorist might kill “Julie Darkheart,” Mr. Roeder’s insulting name for Ms. Burkhart. By opening the clinic in Dr. Tiller’s building, Ms. Burkhart has made herself a “target,” both men said on the tape, which was first reported by RH Reality Check. “I don’t know if anyone will pick up the gauntlet,” Mr. Leach says ominously, adding that he hadn’t known Mr. Roeder would act until he did.