Dr. McHugh comes to Kansas

Rose obviously did not anticipate the appearance in Kansas of Dr. Paul McHugh. Before leaving office, Kline had contracted with the impeccably credentialed Harvard-trained psychiatrist.  He was to review the Tiller files to see if they honored Kansas law from a psychiatric perspective since very nearly all the files claimed a mental health exemption.  Anticipating Morrison’s end game, pro-life forces brought McHugh to Kansas City in June 2007 to share his insights.

To this point, Morrison had showed no interest in McHugh or his findings. Despite McHugh’s role as chief medical witness on the Tiller case, no one from his Morrison’s staff had bothered to ask his opinion during the five months Morrison had been in office.

Morrison took much more interest in the good doctor when McHugh came to town. In fact, he sent several staffers to a planned McHugh press conference in suburban Kansas City. They were there to confront McHugh and deliver a menacing letter demanding that he “cease and desist from all public comment” about his work.

The letter was a bluff, and it was too late in any case.  In an earlier taped interview, now on YouTube, the gentle, grandfatherly psychiatrist dispassionately showed just what a sham the whole Tiller enterprise was.  When asked whether he had seen any one patient file that justified a late-term abortion on the basis of major or irreversible psychiatric damage, McHugh unequivocally responded, “I saw no patient file that justified abortion on that basis.”

What McHugh did see were insubstantial, poorly documented evaluations of disheartened young women whose stated reasons for wanting an abortion were as trivial as hoping to see a rock concert or missing a prom. He was confident too that “100 percent” of his fellow psychiatrists would agree that none of these cases showed any sign of irreversible damage.

As to the “single episode, major depression” and “adjustment disorder” that Tiller claimed for his patients in their files, McHugh could find no evidence of either. McHugh insisted that a serious biographical history should have been performed on every young woman, especially “if you are going to take a life on the basis of a psychiatric exam.”

“I had to ask myself,” said McHugh of Tiller’s clinic. “is any person ever found to be not appropriate on psychological grounds for an abortion?”

Morrison feints

Two weeks after McHugh came to town, following nearly six months of dithering on the charges against Tiller, Morrison chose Thursday afternoon, June 28, to announce their disposition.

This was a classic news dump. That morning the immigration bill had died in the U.S. Senate and sucked all the air out of the conservative media. Morrison dropped his announcement into the vacuum.  His press conference was stunningly ugly and disingenuous. He spent the greater part of it promoting his own record and attacking Kline for a wide variety of offenses, all of them either imagined or irrelevant.

Morrison noted how “ironic” it was that Kline did not file charges until the end of his term, “all the while knowing that I [Morrison] would have to deal with that.” As Morrison knew, however, it was not Kline who had ginned up the irony, but Tiller and his allies.  They had fought for years to keep the medical records away from prying eyes, and the state’s Supreme Court largely obliged them.

As Morrison surely suspected, Tiller had much to hide. But the way Morrison interpreted the relevant statute, it did not matter whether a woman had a legally justifiable need for an abortion as long as two unaffiliated doctors were willing to say that she did, even if their diagnoses were incomplete or transparently false. This finessing of the law allowed Morrison to showily dismiss all of the charges Kline had brought and ridicule Kline for bringing them.

Lest he be accused of a total whitewash, Morrison had to charge Tiller with something. And so he noted that the two doctors sanctioning the abortions--Tiller himself and a Dr. Kristin Neuhaus—were, in fact, affiliated, and this relationship “thwarts the letter of that statute.”

The thwarting was much more serious than Morrison let on.  The law mandated that the seconding physician not to be legally or financially affiliated with the first.  It was written specifically to protect the unborn against the kind of indiscriminate rubber stamping Neuhaus had been doing for years.

Neuhaus was a piece of work.  A former abortionist, and daughter of a politically active Democrat lawyer, she had twice been cited by the Kansas Medical Board of Healing Arts as a danger to the public.  One former patient even accused her of proceeding with an abortion after the women had withdrawn her consent.  For several years Neuhaus had been using a P.O. Box as her office address. 

Morrison seemed to be following the game plan leaked to the Sun’s Steve Rose a few weeks earlier: file a few misdemeanor charges, suggest a modest fine, and call the “witch hunt” off.  The Star bought the strategy. “Doctors must scrupulously follow the law,” its editorialists comically opined. They praised Morrison’s “honesty and respect for the law” and heaped even more scorn on Kline given the “disturbing details” Morrison revealed about his work.

But Tiller did not get to be a stone cold abortionist in a deep red state by being stupid. Both and he and Neuhaus promptly denied a financial affiliation. Apparently, the wily Tiller did not pay Neuhaus for her opinion. The patients did directly and at his facility.

“I think [Morrison] is making a strained interpretation of the law,” said Neuhaus’s attorney. And while the lawyers dickered anew, Tiller continued to mock Kansas law by aborting perfectly healthy, viable babies for reasons no more serious than a teenager’s dismay about missing her prom.

 Page [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]