Hilzoy highlighted an article enumerating how Operation Rescue harassed George Tiller's practice and his staff. This is chilling:
...hundreds of [administrative assistant Sarah Phares'] neighbors received an anonymous postcard of a mangled fetus. This is abortion! read the big block letters. "Your neighbor Sara Phares participates in killing babies like these." The postcard implored them to call Phares, whose phone number and address were provided, and voice their opposition to her work at the clinic. Another card soon followed. It referred to Phares as "Miss I Help to Kill Little Babies" and suggested, in an erratic typeface that recalled a kidnapper's ransom note, that neighbors "beg her to quit, pretty please." The third postcard dispensed entirely with pleasantries: "Sara Phares is not to be trusted! Tell her to get a life!" (...)
Before long, protesters from Operation Rescue showed up at her house. They parked a tractor-trailer across the street, plastered with twenty-foot-long images of dismembered fetuses. From its speakers came the kind of sweet, tinkling music that lures children from their back yards in pursuit of Dreamsicles. One protester, a somber man in a tan windbreaker with a three-foot crucifix thrust before him, performed an exorcism on Phares' front lawn, sprinkling holy water on the grass to cast demons from the property.
And of course this kind of radicalism lead up to the murder of Dr. Tiller.
Tiller performed late-term abortions, but contrary to anti-choice extremists and the hyperbolic lies they spread about the procedure, it isn't a joy killing. It's not a procedure of convenience. Hilzoy has more.
Adding... Remember all of that wingnut outrage over "right wing extremists"?