These four clinics have been targeted, threatened and are struggling to stay open.

I often write about post-Dr. George Tiller efforts to provide reproductive health services for women all over the United States. It’s getting more and more difficult, as you can see in my post Despite murder threats by anti-abortion extremists, a new clinic is trying to serve Kansas women.

It’s Roe v. Wade’s 40th birthday, yet pro-forced-birthers are harassing and intimidating easy female targets and using hostility and scare tactics on physicians and other personnel that offer legal abortions. Clinics are closing, health services are disappearing, and women are being deprived of care as well as their rights.

And Dr. George Tiller, one of the brave health care providers who never allowed these extremists to intimidate or stop him from legally helping women who depended on his services, was murdered.

Now the Sundance Film Festival is premiering a documentary called “After Tiller.” Just showing a movie about Dr. Tiller created an atmosphere similar to what the four clinics pictured above are experiencing. The L.A. Times:

For starters, police and armed sheriffs in green jumpsuits made a show of force outside the Temple Theater. Attendees had to have their bags searched and were checked by guards with hand-held metal detectors. After the movie screened, two police officers stood at the front of the auditorium as the directors of the abortion documentary — and the four doctors featured in the film — answered questions from the audience.

“After Tiller” is an intimate and heartfelt look at the four doctors who legally perform third-trimester abortions in the United States, doing so even after the 2009 assassination of such a physician, Dr. George Tiller.  [...]

Late abortions make up less than 1% of all abortions performed in the United States… Small discoveries like that drew the duo to the subject. [...]

The women turn to these late-term procedures for personal and medical reasons, including fetal anomalies, the health of the women, and sometimes because the women don’t even realize or admit to themselves that they are pregnant.

For many of these patients, and their male partners, the decision is an agonizing one. And the doctors themselves frequently discuss moral questions themselves. … They voice concern about what desperate measures women might take if their services were unavailable. As to whether the protests against what he does ever gave him doubts regarding his work, Dr. LeRoy Carhart said, “I never even give it a second thought.”

Please read more about the film here.