Mark Gietzen, who became known as one of the country’s most ardent opponents of abortion, passed away on Tuesday. He turned 69.
Kansas Republican Party announced are dead. The Wichita Eagle reported that Mr. Gietzen died when his Cessna 172 a few miles northeast of Chambers, Neb.
Last August, in what would prove to be his last large-scale political initiative, Mr. Gietzen (pronounced GEET sentence) spent nearly $120,000 to fund a recount of Kansas’s decisive vote to preserve abortion rights. That month, Mr. Gietzen told The Eagle that the expenses would make it more difficult for him to refurbish his Cessna, which he said he had been working on for 15 years.
The recount did not change the outcome.
Mr. Gietzen had been prominent in Kansas politics since the so-called Summer of Mercy in 1991, when thousands of people gathered in Wichita to block access to abortion clinics, at risk of arrest.
A resident of Wichita since the late 1970s and long interested in Republican politics, Gietzen threw herself into political organizing after that summer, becoming president of the Republican organization in Sedgwick County, which includes Wichita. With his help, the Republicans won the Kansas House of Representatives, inaugurating control of both state legislative chambers that has continued since.
Mr. Gietzen devoted much of his time to an organization he chaired, the Kansas Coalition for Life, and to its protests against Dr. George Tiller, a Wichita abortionist. The long-simmering battle against the practice of Dr. Tiller helped make the city a gathering place for the national abortion debate.
Mr. Gietzen chaired a network of hundreds of volunteers working in shifts protesting against Dr. Tiller. They tried to persuade the patients who arrived at his clinic to change their mind – they counted “saves” for women who decided not to have an abortion.
Activists blocked his clinic, campaigned for him to be prosecuted, followed him with hidden cameras, sued him, threatened him. One bombed his clinic. Another tried to kill him in 1993, firing five shots and wounding both arms.
Dr. Tiller defiantly dug in, expanding his clinic and beefing up security.
The battle ended on a Sunday morning in 2009 when Mr. Tiller was shot dead while attending church. His clinic closed and Mr. Gietzen was a popular topic in the national news media.
“It seems our prayer has been answered,” Mr Gietzen told The New York Times. “However, we would have liked to have done this in a different way. Now we have thousands of people slandering us, refusing to donate and telling us that our website instigated this.”
Mr. Gietzen was born on February 9, 1954 and grew up in Glen Ullin, ND, a small town near Bismarck. His father was involved in the state’s fledgling anti-abortion movement.
He served in the Marines and earned an associate degree in aeronautical maintenance from the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the late 1970s. Soon after, he moved to Wichita to work for Boeing.
He was a frequent unsuccessful candidate in local elections, including for mayor of Wichita.
He was the single parent of three children. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
In the 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”, which examined the rise of populist conservatism in the state, Mr. Gietzen was portrayed as a symbol of some of the forces driving former liberal Americans to leave the Democratic Party. reject.
“Gietzen built a social movement, one convert at a time,” wrote the author, Thomas Frank. “On the left, it is common to hear descriptions of the Resistance as a strictly top-down affair in which Republican enchanters rally a demographically shrinking sector of the population for one last, weary ride. However, what Wichita Republicans have accomplished should dispel this myth forever. They shouted their combative creed to every citizen of the city, sharpened the differences, polarized the electorate, let everyone know what was at stake.”
Mr. Frank continued, “Gietzen and company wanted not only Wichita’s votes, but also her participation. They were going to change the world.”