Tiller ignores Kline

Although Tiller proved more cautious with Kline in office, an abortion that took place in May 2003 would reveal just how confident Tiller was in his ability to weather even Kline’s tenure as attorney general.  It would also show how gruesomely routine were Tiller’s violations of state law.

That year, as she would later testify before the Kansas legislature, the then 18 year-old Michelle Berge, now Armesto-Berge, was pressured by her mother to abort her baby in the 26th week of her pregnancy.

“It’s murder and I will not do it,” Michelle protested, but her mother had other plans.  Staff at Tiller’s clinic eased those plans along by informing Michelle of a Catholic group that “believed in abortion” and promised baptism for the aborted baby. In reality, the Catholic Church considers abortion “murder” and “always morally evil,” an article of faith that has so far eluded the ostensibly Catholic Kathleen Sebelius.

As Armesto-Berge would soon learn, Tiller honored Kansas law about as faithfully as he proffered Catholic doctrine. Not one woman among the five with whom she was being processed, herself included, risked physical or mental health impairment of any sort.

The women talked among themselves during their stay in Wichita. “All were there,” Armesto-Berge testified, “because they were told [late-term abortion] would solve their problems.” These problems ranged from unreliable boyfriends to socially ambitious parents.

After the group watched a video on “Dr. Tiller’s legacy,” a nurse took Armesto-Berge to a private room and prepared her for an ultrasound. When she tried to look at the screen, the nurse abruptly moved the screen away.  She was then taken to another room. There a female doctor inserted a large needle twice to make sure she injected the unborn child, “and that,” said Armesto-Berge, “is when the baby was killed.”

Only after this procedure was completed did Armesto-Berge fill out the paperwork and meet with a counselor, a charge proven by time stamps on her medical records. She also met with a self-identified Unitarian minister who consoled her with the hitherto unknown Christian doctrine, “You have to take care of the ones who are here, not the ones who aren't born.”

After the initial injections Armesto-Berge underwent a variety of preparations to facilitate the delivery of the dead baby. A late-term abortion of this kind usually takes three-days.  Like most others, Armesto-Berge spent her nights at a Wichita hotel. On her second day, Armesto-Berge met casually with Tiller for the first time but only for a few minutes. He talked to her about his own teenage child and how presumably, “if in the same situation, would do the same thing.”

The next morning, Armesto-Berge’s fiancé found the hotel at which she was staying. “He begged me not to go through with the abortion,” Armesto-Berge lamented, “and I told him it was too late.” The fiancé was sincere in his affection. Despite the abortion, he later married Armesto-Berge, and today the couple has three living children.

By the third day Armesto-Berge’s labor had proceeded to the point where she was ready to deliver. What follows is not for the faint of heart.

“I remember yelling at the nurse and calling her names and telling her I did not want to be on the toilet,” Armesto-Berge recounted. “I finally birthed the baby and I distinctly remember seeing the baby on the floor to the left of the toilet.” Said Armesto-Berge, “That image haunts me daily.”

There was no follow-up care of any kind for the young woman. Nor did Tiller’s clinic call to see that there was.  Only when Armesto-Berge obtained her medical records four years after the abortion did she learn the depths of Tiller’s deceit: he had falsely designated her baby “non-viable,” a status that requires a lower standard of validation.

For an abortion on a viable baby, a second doctor, one not affiliated with the abortionist, must verify that the abortion is needed to prevent the mother’s death or impairment. Armesto-Berge’s husband believes that if his baby had been properly identified as viable, and a second doctor sought, he might have had time to reach Michelle early enough to save their baby.

The Industry finds a savior

To complement its legal and media strategies, the abortion industry contributed to a political strategy as well.  In October 2005, after some serious backstage engineering by Sebelius and her cronies, popular Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison, a moderate Republican, announced that he would switch parties to run against Kline in November 2006.

"I pledge to you to uphold the laws of the state for everyone," Morrison said at the time, adding with a none too subtle nod to the abortion industry, "I will not pursue a narrow agenda that benefits just a few."

While Kline waited for the lower court to release the patient files that he had subpoenaed, the Kansas abortion industry went to work on Kline. Tiller invested a small fortune to unseat him, much of it through operations like “Kansans for Consumer Privacy Protection,” an anonymous cut-out which just happened to have the same Wichita address as Tiller’s ProKanDo PAC.

ProKanDo identified voters and paid for phone calls.  The aforementioned “consumer group” then used the information to send out six, coordinated, slick “Snoop Dog Kline” mailers in the weeks before the 2006 election. The mailers accused Kline of abandoning the fight on crime in favor of “snooping into women’s private medical records.”  Between his PAC and the non-profit at the same address, Tiller and allies spent $1.2 million on the 2006 campaign alone.

From the beginning, the media should have seen how contrived were the abortion’s industry’s worries about patient privacy. Tiller’s website, for instance, provided the following caveat for prospective patients:  “In connection with any fundraising, we may disclose to our fundraising staff demographic information about you (e.g. your name, address and phone number) and dates of health care that we provided you.”  Patient information, the web site cautioned, also passed through any number of insurance companies and third party payers.

When Mary Kay Culp, the head of Kansans for Life, made the media aware of Tiller’s willingness to share patient data with fundraisers—including the date of the “health care”--Tiller’s clinic immediately removed the notice from its web site.  For most of the state’s media, this was just as well.  They preferred to run with the Snoop Dog message. The Kansas City Star’s support for “reproductive justice” in the battle against the “anti-choice extremist” Kline was so passionate, in fact, that Planned Parenthood honored the Star with the “Maggie,” its top national prize for editorial writing.

Two former moderate Republican attorneys general, Bob Stephan and Carla Stovall, endorsed Morrison, as did former state GOP chairman Dennis Jones.  Former Republican state chairman, Mark Parkinson, signed on to co-chair Morrison’s campaign and later formally switched parties to run as Sebelius’s lieutenant governor.

Tiller dollars flowed to the Democratic Party, and campaign dollars flowed from the Democrats and moderate Republicans to Morrison.  This gave him a two-to-one edge over the incumbent Kline in real dollar support, above and beyond Tiller’s indirect aid and the full-throated support of the media. 

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