Shelley Sella, 51, is the youngest member of Tiller’s killing team. She grew up in New York City and attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, majoring in women’s studies, before attending medical school at Tel Aviv University Sackler School of Medicine. (How ironic that she would attend a Jewish university to learn Nazi baby-killing techniques!) She received her original medical license in 1988.
Sella worked for many years for Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California, before leaving to work at Planned Parenthood of Shasta Diablo. Since then Sella has become a “circuit rider” abortionist, splitting her time between a number of abortion mills in California, and George Tiller’s Women’s Health Care Services in Wichita, Kansas, where she works every third week.
Sella is a financial contributor to a radical California pro-abortion group called ACCESS, Women’s Health Rights Coalition. This group’s stated goals are to prevent women from patronizing pro-life crisis pregnancy centers and insure greater access to abortion services beyond 20 weeks, or the fifth month of pregnancy.
Sella is a lesbian who was married to her female lover, Julie Litwin, in a civil marriage service in San Francisco, CA, on Valentine’s Day, 2004, in the presence of Litwin’s son, who was seven years old at the time. The Sella-Litwin “marriage” was one of dozens of gay civil ceremonies performed in San Francisco in early 2004. Courts later ruled that those “marriages” would not be recognized by the State.
Ironically, Litwin is a certified midwife, a profession antithetical to Sella’s abortion career.
A complaint was filed by Operation Rescue President Troy Newman against Sella and Tiller in October, 2007, on behalf of former abortion patient Michelle Armesto-Berge. The complaint alleges that Sella began the abortion process on Armesto-Berge before consent was obtained. Because Armesto-Berge was late and missed the appointment with the second physician that must sign off on abortions on viable babies after 22 weeks gestation, the complaint alleges that Sella misrepresented the 25 week baby as being “non-viable.”
A former Tiller employee came forward in April, 2008, and told Operation Rescue that a baby at 35 weeks gestation was born alive and that the former employee witnessed Sella stab the baby to death. OR reported the incident to the police, who opened a murder investigation against Sella. A complaint was filed with the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts asking for the suspension of Sella’s medical license and the immediate closure of WHCS.
