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MARCH 18, 2015 | 19
Police tape surrounds Susan Cahill’s office in Kalispell after it was broken into overnight on March 4, 2014. BEACON FILE PHOTO
he’d pay attention to. I mean, my Rolodex. He ripped the base off and tore it up.”
Klundt left Cahill with nothing, or less than nothing, of a practice she’d been building successfully for nearly a decade. After the vandalism, she con- tacted her insurance company for reim- bursement, only to find out her liability coverage only applied to the building she had occupied just three weeks earlier, on Meridian Avenue.
“I never would have checked that. I knew when (my insurance) was up, I al- ways paid it on time, and all that stuff. It never would have crossed my mind,” she said. “So I didn’t get anything from it.”
Other than $13,400 for electronics, there was no reimbursement. An esti- mate written up for the Flathead County District Court judge on this case shows more than $33,000 lost on items from the office, along with the nearly $20,000 she had invested renovating the new space.
Cahill also lists her personal sala- ry loss, as well as the value of the busi- ness she was planning on selling in 2016, bringing the total loss to just un- der $500,000. After the vandalism, she received $62,000 in donations from the Montana Human Rights Network, and $2,625 from Love Lives Here, an affiliate of the network.
All Families Healthcare was the only
abortion provider in the Flathead Valley, though Cahill noted that abortions were only a part of her business, and most of it was dedicated to family health care.
While advocating for legal, safe abor- tion has been a large part of her career, Cahill considers working as a physician’s assistant a calling; it’s a vocation, not a job.
“I miss my patients,” she said. “Aside from the abortion issue, my patients were my first priority. It matters hugely to me to be of service, and I enjoyed the kind of service I did.”
Her medical career began after earn- ing a medical anthropology degree from the University of Massachusetts, which she followed up with a physician’s assis- tant degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Cahill began the PA program in 1974 and finished in 1976, and her training included abortion procedures due to the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Cahill visited the Flathead in 1976, and decided to complete her final elec- tive for her PA program here, with Dr. James Armstrong.
Armstrong moved to the Flathead in the mid 1960s to work as a doctor, eventually settling in Kalispell and opening his practice in 1964. Once Roe v. Wade happened in 1973, Armstrong, now 85, said he wanted to provide safe, legal abortion procedures for women in
Northwest Montana after seeing the in- fections and death that could trail the “back-alley” abortions performed by unqualified providers.
During his medical training at a metro hospital in New York prior to the Roe v. Wade decision, Armstrong said the staff would see 20 women a day after they had criminal abortions.
“A woman came in in the evening, she was about 25,” Armstrong said, re- membering one case in particular. “She had a fever and we couldn’t tell where the infection was coming from. It finally came out that she’d had an abortion.”
At that time, the medical staff was re- quired to report such procedures to law enforcement, and Armstrong remem- bers two male detectives interrogating the patient about who had performed the abortion and where.
“I stayed with her with the detec- tives,” he said. “She died in just a couple of hours.”
He said he saw similar infections at his practice in Kalispell, and, figuring women would continue seeking abor- tions, whether from a doctor or an un- qualified person, he decided to provide the procedures.
Cahill joined Armstrong’s prac- tice after receiving her PA degree, and worked with him for the nearly 30 years. On Oct. 11, 1994, the clinic was fire- bombed by Richard T. Andrews, a Wash-
ington man who was eventually convict- ed of scorching seven clinics in western states.
“My main emotion was anger,” Arm- strong said of the arson. “But we were back working within two weeks.”
The firebombing was one of the first instances of violence against her prac- tice, Cahill said, though it had a differ- ent feel to it because the man eventually charged and convicted of the crime was not a local.
She’s become accustomed to the dai- ly letters from religious organizations asking her to stop performing abortions, and even the picketers who would plant themselves in front of her office.
“But it does wear one down, and this last thing, particularly because it was a destruction and somebody that was in my community, that’s a whole different ballgame to me,” Cahill said. “It feels very different and very personal.”
So personal that Cahill is convinced there is a connection between Klundt and Hope Pregnancy Ministries, where his mother, Twyla Klundt, sat on the board until the vandalism.
Before she moved to the First Avenue East building in Kalispell, Cahill practiced out of a building on Meridian Road for about seven years. When the building went up for sale last year, Cahill said she declined to buy it because she was planning on retiring in 2016 and