Julie Burkhart is the founder of Trust Women, a group that operates clinics to ensure women can get an abortion in a United States, increasingly polarised by the issue.
She was a colleague of Dr George Tiller, a doctor murdered for providing late-term terminations to women who wanted them, but says she is determined to carry on his work because she believes people need abortions.
The 2016 election didn't go the way many of us wanted, or the way many of us voted.
However, the 2016 election didn't exist in a vacuum; we have been fighting these battles every day for years.
Wichita has always been the epicentre for many fights regarding women's rights, especially after the late and beloved Dr George Tiller, my former mentor and boss, provided late termination of pregnancy for women from all over the world.
In 1991, protesters descended upon the city en masse. Streets were clogged; clinics were blockaded by thousands of aggressive demonstrators.
For months, Wichita was a national spectacle while patients and doctors alike were harassed.
Eventually, most of the demonstrators left and went back where they came from.
But some stayed, set up shop and made it their mission to shut down Dr Tiller by any means necessary.
They harassed him at his office and his church. They even targeted staff at their homes and churches. They hounded him in the courts and they worked to ban a constitutionally guaranteed right in the legislature.
In 2009, Dr Tiller was murdered by an anti-choice extremist, who had been radicalised by Wichita-based anti-choice extremists.
Dr Tiller knew the risks, and he continued to provide abortion care to women in Kansas.
Dr Tiller believed that "Attitude is Everything," and he wore a button almost every day of the week that said just that.
I've been thinking about how he would feel about the direction of our country.
I am quite confident that Dr Tiller would have taken the long view and would have reminded us about the long arc of justice.
After all, this is a man, who after being shot in both arms as he was leaving work one night in August 1993, went back to work the very next day in the building where our Wichita clinic is located.
And after going back to work, he put up a sign in the parking lot that said, "Hell no, we won't go."
I think about Dr Tiller's axioms daily. Trust Women's clinics have "Tillerisms" hung on the walls in memoriam.
After the 2016 election, harassment and threats against abortion providers has doubled, making anti-choice violence the highest it's been in 40 years.
Take heart in the fact that proactive, pro-choice legislation has also been on the rise.
Forty years ago, pro-choice bills in state legislatures were extremely scarce. However, pro-choice legislation surged in 2017 with 645 bills introduced that sought to protect access to reproductive health care. Eighty-six of these bills were passed into law across various states.
Dr Tiller's sign has become a daily mantra, "Hell no, we won't go."
That's why I opened his clinic in Wichita back up in 2013, and that's why Trust Women has expanded care to Oklahoma City and Washington State.
When our Oklahoma City clinic opened in September of 2016, Oklahoma City was the largest metropolitan area without an abortion provider – as Wichita had been the largest previously.
Despite the intentional obstacles and hindrances, people need abortions. People need reproductive health care, and so we provide.
People will always need abortion access; they always have. We know that restricting access doesn't stop abortions, it doesn't make abortions safer and it certainly doesn't deter people from seeking care. All restrictions do is make a safe, simple, private medical procedure less safe, harder to access and political.
Now the future of access and legal abortion in this country, the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, hangs precariously by a thread if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.
It is not enough to guarantee a federal right when state legislatures have the ability to chip away at those rights.
We need to start thinking beyond the judiciary, to the states, to do the right thing for women.
Legislators can introduce proactive bills in their Legislatures, and that is how we will ensure that all women, and all people, have access and the right to abortion.
We, as a nation, are risking the right to live our own lives as we see fit. States must step up and defend our rights in the wake of an ideologically driven activist court. We need our states and our elected officials to act to protect their constituents, their rights and their privacy.
More from Abortion
The constitutional right to choose to have an abortion is a right only in theory, if not everyone can access health care.
Julie A. Burkhart is the founder and CEO of Trust Women. Trust Women opens clinics that provide abortion care in underserved communities so that all women can make their own decisions about their healthcare. Follow her on Twitter @Julieburkhart.
Julie Burkhart is the founder of Trust Women, a group that operates clinics to ensure women can get an abortion in a United States, increasingly polarised by the issue.
She was a colleague of Dr George Tiller, a doctor murdered for providing late-term terminations to women who wanted them, but says she is determined to carry on his work because she believes people need abortions.
The 2016 election didn't go the way many of us wanted, or the way many of us voted.
However, the 2016 election didn't exist in a vacuum; we have been fighting these battles every day for years.
Wichita has always been the epicentre for many fights regarding women's rights, especially after the late and beloved Dr George Tiller, my former mentor and boss, provided late termination of pregnancy for women from all over the world.
In 1991, protesters descended upon the city en masse. Streets were clogged; clinics were blockaded by thousands of aggressive demonstrators.
For months, Wichita was a national spectacle while patients and doctors alike were harassed.
Eventually, most of the demonstrators left and went back where they came from.
But some stayed, set up shop and made it their mission to shut down Dr Tiller by any means necessary.
They harassed him at his office and his church. They even targeted staff at their homes and churches. They hounded him in the courts and they worked to ban a constitutionally guaranteed right in the legislature.
In 2009, Dr Tiller was murdered by an anti-choice extremist, who had been radicalised by Wichita-based anti-choice extremists.
Dr Tiller knew the risks, and he continued to provide abortion care to women in Kansas.
Dr Tiller believed that "Attitude is Everything," and he wore a button almost every day of the week that said just that.
I've been thinking about how he would feel about the direction of our country.
I am quite confident that Dr Tiller would have taken the long view and would have reminded us about the long arc of justice.
After all, this is a man, who after being shot in both arms as he was leaving work one night in August 1993, went back to work the very next day in the building where our Wichita clinic is located.
And after going back to work, he put up a sign in the parking lot that said, "Hell no, we won't go."
I think about Dr Tiller's axioms daily. Trust Women's clinics have "Tillerisms" hung on the walls in memoriam.
After the 2016 election, harassment and threats against abortion providers has doubled, making anti-choice violence the highest it's been in 40 years.
Take heart in the fact that proactive, pro-choice legislation has also been on the rise.
Forty years ago, pro-choice bills in state legislatures were extremely scarce. However, pro-choice legislation surged in 2017 with 645 bills introduced that sought to protect access to reproductive health care. Eighty-six of these bills were passed into law across various states.
Dr Tiller's sign has become a daily mantra, "Hell no, we won't go."
That's why I opened his clinic in Wichita back up in 2013, and that's why Trust Women has expanded care to Oklahoma City and Washington State.
When our Oklahoma City clinic opened in September of 2016, Oklahoma City was the largest metropolitan area without an abortion provider – as Wichita had been the largest previously.
Despite the intentional obstacles and hindrances, people need abortions. People need reproductive health care, and so we provide.
People will always need abortion access; they always have. We know that restricting access doesn't stop abortions, it doesn't make abortions safer and it certainly doesn't deter people from seeking care. All restrictions do is make a safe, simple, private medical procedure less safe, harder to access and political.
Now the future of access and legal abortion in this country, the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, hangs precariously by a thread if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.
It is not enough to guarantee a federal right when state legislatures have the ability to chip away at those rights.
We need to start thinking beyond the judiciary, to the states, to do the right thing for women.
Legislators can introduce proactive bills in their Legislatures, and that is how we will ensure that all women, and all people, have access and the right to abortion.
We, as a nation, are risking the right to live our own lives as we see fit. States must step up and defend our rights in the wake of an ideologically driven activist court. We need our states and our elected officials to act to protect their constituents, their rights and their privacy.
More from Abortion
The constitutional right to choose to have an abortion is a right only in theory, if not everyone can access health care.
Julie A. Burkhart is the founder and CEO of Trust Women. Trust Women opens clinics that provide abortion care in underserved communities so that all women can make their own decisions about their healthcare. Follow her on Twitter @Julieburkhart.
