The Man Behind The Curtain
How the Abortion Industry Has Come to Control Kansas
(courtesy of Kansas for Life)
just weeks after proclaiming April “Child Abuse Prevention Month,” Governor Sebelius vetoed the CARA bill.
In her veto message, Sebelius wrote, “I am concerned that the bill is likely unconstitutional or even worse, endangers the lives of women.” Lance Kinzer, the state representative who introduced the bill, accurately dismissed Sebelius’ veto rationale as an “illegitimate, made-up excuse.”
If anything, Kinzer went easy on Sebelius. After ten years of reporting, and more than 5,000 reported late-term abortions, no doctor in the state of Kansas has claimed to have performed a late-term abortion to save a woman’s life. To repeat, that is none, ever.
Sebelius also argued that the bill would have resulted in “extensive litigation” and violated the privacy of women. In that she has been well supported by the state’s trial lawyers, the fear of litigation rings as false as the much abused privacy gambit.
Her defense of the CARA veto was one stretch of public dissembling too much for Archbishop Joseph Naumann. “Evidently, the Governor does not approve of legislators devoting energy to protecting children and women by making it possible to enforce existing Kansas laws regulating late-term abortions,” said Naumann.
“What makes the Governor’s actions and advocacy for legalized abortion, throughout her public career, even more painful for me,” added Naumann, “is that she is Catholic.”
Like many Catholic politicians, Morrison included, Sebelius had been successfully exploiting her faith to secure the votes of her co-religionists. At the end of her first campaign for Governor in October 2002, for instance, Sebelius had sent a mass mailing to dispel allegedly “false” accusations about her position on abortion.
“I am not pro-abortion. I will not, and never have, promoted abortion,” she claimed in her letter. “I feel about abortion just like you do…”
The “never” claim rang false to those who have followed Sebelius’s career. During her work on the Gary Hart campaign in 1984, for instance, she proudly hung a button above her desk that read “Women's Independence Day! January 22, 1973.” If celebrating Roe v. Wade is not promoting abortion, one was entitled to ask, what is?
In 1989, reacting to a court decision on the murder of a woman and her unborn child of eight months, state representative Sebelius publicly argued against extending victim status to the child. “There are certain inalienable rights established for a person,” she said coldly, “but those are not applied in utero.”
With her first statewide run in 1994, this time for state insurance commissioner, Sebelius took money directly from Dr. Tiller and his various organizations. Her run for governor in 2002, however, called for more discretion, especially given her professed lack of enthusiasm for abortion.
These circumstances likely account for the $100,000 mid-campaign donation by Tiller’s Women’s Health clinic to the Democratic Governor’s Association. Although this was Tiller’s only known contribution to that association, before or since, it would not have been the first time he discreetly finessed a contribution through Democrat PACS to reach its target.
“There is substantial evidence,” columnist Robert Novak recently charged, “[Sebelius] has been involved in laundering abortion industry money for distribution to Kansas Democrats.” Such is the ethical jujitsu that abortion supporters have long practiced to secure power in a deep red state like Kansas.
The tide turns?
In assuming the role of attorney general in early 2008, Stephen Six likely knew of the collaboration between the attorney general’s office under Paul Morrison and the Kansas abortion industry, but he may not have appreciated the depth of it.
If he believed what he read in the newspapers, Six would have thought Kline a single-issue fanatic from “the Taliban wing of the Kansas GOP,” one who needed to be watched and constrained. Undoubtedly, Morrison and Sebelius would have reinforced this message. Initially, at least, Six did as expected. He tried to suppress the Wichita grand jury, to keep the KDHE reports out of Kline’s hands, and to prevent Judge Anderson from testifying in the Planned Parenthood case.
When the Supreme Court unsealed its case records, however, Six had to have seen what an unholy can of worms he had inherited. Six might also have begun to wonder what his own liability would be were these particular worms ever exposed to light.
In late May, 2008 Kline made a pair of motions to the Supreme Court whose net effect would be to allow Anderson to testify. Six responded in a way that stunned almost everyone, Kline included.
After more than a year of prevarication from the attorney general’s office, much of it on his watch, Six suggested that he had no objection to Anderson keeping and using the Planned Parenthood reports. He asked only that the court “order the return of the records after all pending litigation (including prosecution) has completed”—a routine request.
“I am pleased that the Attorney General’s office has reversed course,” said Kline with nicely understated irony, “and now recognizes that redacted records in which judges have found probable cause to believe that crimes have been committed should be used in the criminal prosecution.”
Whether Planned Parenthood or Dr. Tiller will ever be brought to justice, or will even have a genuine day in court, remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that the battle for the soul of the state has been joined, and the tide might just be turning. 
For a one-page printer-friendly comprehensive report on this subject, prepared in cooperation with Kansans for Life, please visit Kansans for Life
