He shot him. He killed him -- while he was handing out Sunday bulletins in church.

Scott Roeder has been charged with murdering Dr. George Tiller. A controversial figure, Dr. Tiller was one of the few doctors in the country who regularly performed late-term abortions -- defined as abortions after the 22nd of 36 weeks of pregnancy -- at his Wichita, Kan., clinic.

Mr. Roeder's family described the 51-year-old as mentally disturbed, with a long history of involvement in anti-government and anti-tax fringe groups. He had also identified himself as strongly anti-abortion, though his ties to any organized pro-life group were murky at best.

Rightly so, pro-life groups were quick to denounce Dr. Tiller's murder and the tragedy that someone would take a life in the name of defending innocent life. It defies anything sensible that anyone dedicated to the sacredness of life would kill another human being.

Pro-abortion groups, pundits, columnists and cartoonists have hinted -- sometimes mildly, sometimes more directly -- that Dr. Tiller's murderer is somehow reflective of pro-life people as a whole, incomprehensibly painting the caricature of pro-life people as different from Mr. Roeder only by a matter of degrees.

I have been a part of the pro-life movement since before there was really any defined pro-life movement. I was a shocked college student when abortion was allowed in a handful of states in the late 1960s. I was more profoundly shocked on Jan. 22, 1973 when, as a seminarian studying for the priesthood, I turned on the TV news that night to learn that the Supreme Court had declared abortion a right.

In those early days, there was also a common caricature of people who were pro-life. When I was first active in the pro-life movement, abortion was defined in the media as a "Catholic issue," as if the sacredness of life was a sectarian belief. It was common then to identify pro-life people by their religion if they were Catholic. The same religious test would never be applied to those on the pro-abortion side, unless they were Catholic and then it became a man-bites-dog story.

The early take was that the pro-life position was a curiosity rather than a principle, one of those vaguely "Catholic things," like saying the Rosary or not eating meat on Lenten Fridays.

Catholics found themselves being marginalized over the issue in those years, and abortion would be argued not on its merits, but often as a question on the role of religion -- specifically the Catholic religion -- in society. And anti-Catholic prejudice was a card to be played.

Catholics from those days would get the same three questions whenever they raised the issue of abortion in a public forum: "Are you Catholic? Does not the Catholic Church believe that abortion is wrong? Aren't you therefore trying to force your religion on everyone else?" And our answers were, "Yes. Yes. No."

Defending the sacredness of human life, we argued, was not a parochial cause but a fundamental part of our humanity and a fundamental tenet of our country -- "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Compromise life, we argued, and everything is up for grabs. Death gives us only one lonely answer; life gives us a million opportunities to make the world a better place.

As the years went by, the pro-life movement that was supposed to disappear never did. And "pro-life" was no longer defined as a "Catholic issue" but a position embraced by people of all faiths and no faith at all. And lest it be forgotten, the pro-life position covers a wide range of issues in addition to abortion -- encompassing opposition to capital punishment, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, war and violence of any kind -- to name but a few.

Certainly, the pro-life movement has never been monolithic, even in those early alleged "Catholic" days. Today, our politics might not be the same. Our approach in reaching out for hearts and minds might not be the same. But our dedication to the sacredness of human life binds us together.

The latest Pew research study shows that pro-life Americans make up nearly half the population. They are in every age group, every religion, every political party, every neighborhood, every part of the country, every race and every color.

If you want to know what pro-life people look like, forget the caricatures and cartoonists, the propaganda and the pundits. Just take a look at your neighbor.