Doctor struggles to fill role of slain Kansas abortion provider

LA Times: In the past, if her patients with unwanted pregnancies asked where to get an abortion, she sent them to George Tiller. After his death, women seeking the procedure increasingly turned to Mile Means 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." If not her, Means thought, who?

The decision marked a full circle for Means, who grew up in Wichita with parents who supported abortion rights. In her 20s, though, she joined a fundamentalist church with a rigid antiabortion stance. Her own beliefs were more ambivalent. She once applied as medical director of a pregnancy crisis center that talked women out of abortion but said she did not get the job because she could not agree that abortion was never justified. She now sees that time in her life as a passing phase before her politics drifted left.

Editor: Operation Rescue notes that the LA Times leaves out the fact that in 2007, Means was disciplined by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts for having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a patient and for undisclosed offenses that were sexual in nature. She is also in tremendous debt and has on file an order from one creditor to garnish her wages.


Related: National Right to Life notes that, "Perhaps [the reason for the delay] has something to do with an extensive, unsettling profile of Means done by Fred Mann of the Wichita Eagle last June. Mann’s account showed Means to be a 57-year-old, floundering physician in permanent financial hock, whose personal life was in shambles, but who nonetheless claimed she was not embarking upon providing abortions to make money."