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The murder of abortion provider George Tiller prompts me to do something I do not like to do—venture into the issue of abortion. My hesitation is not because I do not have a position. I do. I believe that matters of reproductive rights and responsibilities are most appropriately left to the woman who is pregnant, her religious and moral conscience and her physician. I believe that the father of the child has a role in the conversation and that the state has a stake in the issue. I do not want abortion to be totally unregulated.

The 690-member Refor mation Lutheran congregation in Wichita, a part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, was “shocked by the violent murder” of physician George Tiller, 67, a “longtime member,” who was serving as an usher when he was killed on May 31.

Police arrested Scott Roeder, 51, who was charged June 2 with the fatal shooting. News reports identified him as an ardent antiabortion activist who once identified with antigovernment militia groups.

The setting of the murder of physician George Tiller—a Sunday morning inside the Lutheran church where he was a member—counters the image of late-term abortion providers as secularists, casting him more as a churchgoing martyr than a godless murderer.

Tiller was shot and killed May 31 while passing out bulletins in the lobby of his Wichita, Kansas, church as his wife sat with the choir. The event challenges popular perceptions of both abortion providers and the abortion-rights movement.