Wyoming has banned abortion. She opened an abortion clinic after all.

Initially, Ms. Burkhart said, “He scared the hell out of me,” with his defiance of death threats and a dry sense of humor that people sometimes mistook for brusqueness. But they were “simpatico,” she said. She didn’t mind him calling her at 1am since she was also at work.

“He really understood, and I understood, that this work is risky, that you have to take risks, think outside the box and sometimes make big, difficult and challenging decisions.”

Over the next eight years, she became his clinic’s public face in state politics. She appreciated his approach to the Legislature in opposing efforts to enact even seemingly innocuous rules on abortion providers — for example, requiring their treatment rooms to be larger than those in other surgical practices — because he believed those laws would only but would make it easier for abortion providers. Opponents of abortion are pushing for more restrictions.

Dr. Tiller’s opponents accused him of running a “baby-killing factory,” but Ms. Burkhart saw only deep involvement. “On his practice and on the people,” Ms. Burkhart said. “I really admired that, that he thought everyone deserves forgiveness, redemption, that it’s part of life.”

In May 2009, an extremist who later testified that he had been plotting for years to kill Dr. Tiller, fatally shooting him in his church. The funeral was standing room only. Ms. Burkhart mostly remembers her anger. The political action committee that Dr. Tiller had founded, ProKanDo, had been the state’s largest campaign donor, yet she felt that the politicians it supported had been too timid to stand up for him, or for abortion rights. “I remember people saying, ‘This is devastating, this is terrible, how can this happen?’” she said. “I thought, ‘How do you think this happened?'”