A US court has sentenced an anti-abortion activist to life in prison for murdering the prominent abortion doctor, George Tiller, last year.
Scott Roeder, 52, said he shot Dr Tiller at a church in Wichita, Kansas, to save the lives of unborn babies.
George Tiller was one of the few doctors to offer late-term abortions. The case highlighted the bitter debate over abortion in the US.
The judge said Roeder would not be eligible for parole for 50 years.
Warren Wilbert, the judge at Sedgwick County court, said he gave Roeder the maximum sentence because he admitted stalking Dr Tiller for months.
A life sentence was mandatory, but the judge had the option of making Roeder ineligible for parole for 25 or 50 years.
Judge Wilbert also sentenced Roeder to serve an additional two years in prison for threatening two ushers at the church last May.
In a statement to the court, Roeder said he did not regret killing Dr Tiller.
"I stopped him so he could not dismember another innocent baby," Roeder said. "Wichita is a far safer place for unborn babies without George Tiller."
The Tiller family's lawyer, Lee Thompson, called the murder an act of "domestic terrorism" against a devoted family man who believed strongly in women's rights.
"He respected and trusted the right of women to make their own decisions," said Thompson. "He gave his life to the rights of women."
Dr Tiller's clinic was one of only three in the US that offered late-term abortions - performed after 21 weeks - which are legal in Kansas.
His clinic was heavily fortified after a bomb attack in 1986. Dr Tiller also survived an attempt on his life in 1993.
- Murder is never acceptable. A man shooting and killing someone in a church should absolutely receive life in prison. However, is an abortion performed on a six-month-old fetus not also murder? I am very strongly pro-choice, and believe in the choice to have an abortion, but to an extent. A woman should have the right to choose what to do with her body, yes. But she shouldn't be loafting around for five months and then decide to get an abortion. I believe in the procedure in the first few weeks of the pregnany, when the fetus is just a mass of cells. But after a month of two, that ball of cells now has a heartbeat. And after twenty-one weeks - the amount of time for it to be called a late-term abortion - it's a baby. You cannot argue with that; there has been enough development in its body and mind that the fetus is a person. So while this man shouldn't have killed the abortion doctor, I can understand his outrage that late-term abortions were taking place in his city, because at that point, the line between a woman's choice and taking a life is significantly blurred.
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