The legislature weighs in

In August and September of 2007, concerned by what Kline was discovering, a special joint version of the Federal and State Affairs Committee of the Kansas legislature held hearings on post-viability and late-term abortions in Kansas.

It was here that Michelle Armesto-Berge offered her compelling testimony. Tiller employee, Julie Burkhart, countered by showing a video interview of two very sincere couples, whose unborn babies had been diagnosed with fatal fetal anomalies.  They turned to Dr. Tiller and on the video expressed their appreciation for his services.

Although dramatic, the video spoke to the shell game the abortion cabal had long been playing with the people not just of Kansas but of America: talking about one reality to distract from another.  In this case, the Tiller surrogate used the abortions of two non-viable babies—something legal in Kansas—to distract from the agenda of the hearings, namely illegal, post-22 week abortions performed on viable, unborn babies.  To repeat, a “viable” unborn child is one capable of living outside the womb at the time of the abortion.

The hearing also revealed the indifferent job the Kansas Board of Healing Arts had done in policing the industry.  The Board has apparently never looked at the KDHE reports to which only its members and the attorney general have routine access.  Historically, the Board has responded only to the rare formal complaint and then hesitantly.  The hesitance is not hard to understand.  Among the Board’s more recent Sebelius appointees is a woman who sits on the citizen advisory board of the Planned Parenthood under investigation by Kline.

As to the KDHE, its representatives testified that they didn't think it was their job to judge what doctors wrote on their abortion reports.  They did, however, deny allegations made by Tiller and Morrison, who claimed the KDHE had approved Tiller's habit of declining to give the reason and basis for performing abortions on viable babies.

In the way of poetic justice, the Kansas House and Senate held a later hearing on an unrelated case and so scolded the Board of Healing Arts that its executive director and lead counsel felt compelled to resign. In a rare moment of media candor, the Associated Press attributed the result in part to Kansans for Life and its years of “bird-dogging” the Board on the abortion issue.

The worm turns

Despite the resistance from Kline and Anderson, and the growing restlessness of the legislature, Paul Morrison had every reason to feel confident in the fall of 2007.  He had so charmed the media that he could not have been faulted for imagining himself the next governor of Kansas.

The governor was in good spirits herself.  That December Vogue sent a team of stylists and photographers to shoot Sebelius in the Capitol building. "A truly memorable experience,” she wrote in an email to supporters, “beautiful clothes right off the runway, lots of folks to fuss with hair and makeup.”  The governor was particularly keen on the de la Renta.

While Sebelius was preparing for her photo shoot, Kline was bracing himself for a highly unusual, five-day grilling on his handling of the Planned Parenthood case.  If the Kansas Supreme Court had scheduled this hearing for some reason other than to embarrass Kline, it was not obvious. 

Although the high court had allowed the case against Planned Parenthood to continue, news of the secret hearing, once leaked, reinforced the image of Kline as a wayward zealot.  When Kline asked Morrison for special counsel to represent him at the mini-trial, given the obvious conflict of interest with the AG’s office, Morrison denied him.  Kline was on his own.  

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