Group allowed to present late-term abortion case

By John Hanna

The Associated Press

Published

Friday,
September 07, 2007

It wasn’t the criminal trial abortion opponents had hoped for, but a
legislative committee allowed them to air a case against Dr. George Tiller that
was tossed out of court last year.

Anti-abortion groups also staged a small rally during a lunch break
Thursday, and about 40 people marched to the building that houses Attorney
General Paul Morrison’s office. Their chants called on him to enforce a 1998
state law restricting late-term abortions and to resign for not being vigorous
enough in prosecuting Tiller, one of a few U.S.doctors performing late-term abortions.

Opponents of abortion carry inflatable guitars in a rally Thursday outside the
Statehouse to protest a woman who purportedly said she needed the procedure so
she could attend a rock concert. Participants also took Attorney General Paul
Morrison to task.

Dr. Douglas Mould, a psychologist, says mental health problems faced by
women with unwanted pregnancies are sometimes trivialized.

Morrison has filed 19 misdemeanors against Tiller in Sedgwick County, alleging the Wichita doctor didn’t obtain a second opinion on late-term abortions from an
independent physician, as required by the law.

Many abortion foes say Tiller should be prosecuted instead for performing
such procedures for "trivial" reasons, not medical emergencies.
Morrison’s predecessor, Phill Kline, brought such a case in December, only to
see it dismissed for jurisdictional reasons.

The legislative committee reviewed a DVD recording of an interview with
abortion opponents’ star witness, who said the mental health problems Tiller
saw in patients couldn’t justify aborting viable fetuses. A Wichita-area
psychologist later said that assessment was wrong, though anti-abortion members
of the committee were skeptical.

Meanwhile, Morrison continued to worry that the publicity generated by
abortion opponents’ campaign against Tiller would affect his case. His office
believed playing the DVD could make it more difficult to find an impartial
jury.

"I don’t know what, if any, repercussions that’s going to have,"
Morrison said. "We’ll have to talk about it."

Morrison didn’t attend the legislative hearing. He also wasn’t in his office
when the anti-abortion protesters arrived because he was attending an
international conference on financial fraud in the
Kansas
  City area.

"It’s up to us to keep the pressure on," Kathy Ostrowski, a
lobbyist for Kansans for Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group, told
the activists before their march from the Statehouse.

Tiller’s attorneys have repeatedly said he is innocent.

"This is just another attempt to dredge up the dismissed case peddled
by Phill Kline," said attorney Dan Monnat. "Dr. Tiller has fought for
years to protect the privacy of the women’s medical files. It’s sad that once
again, these women have to continue to wonder whether the content of their
files is going to be exploited for political gain."

The legislative committee’s hearing became the arena for reviewing
allegations against Tiller because it is reviewing the 1998 late-term abortion
law. It may recommend changes.

The law applies after the 21st week of pregnancy and when a fetus can
survive outside the womb. For an abortion to be performed, two doctors must
conclude that if the pregnancy continues, a woman or girl could die or face
"substantial and irreversible" harm to "a major bodily
function." Also, the two physicians can’t be legally or financially
affiliated.

Abortion opponents believe the law was meant to prevent doctors from
aborting viable fetuses unless there was a medical emergency. More than 2,600
late-term abortions have occurred in Kansas since the law took effect.

Kline alleged that Tiller performed 15 abortion in 2003 when his patients
suffered from such conditions as anxiety or single-episode depression. Kline’s
wife, Deborah, attended Thursday’s legislative hearing, as a private citizen,
she said.

Morrison, an abortion-rights Democrat, defeated Kline, an anti-abortion Republican,
in last year’s election.

But before Kline left office, he paid Paul McHugh, the former chairman of
the psychiatry department at
Johns Hopkins University, to review records from
Tiller’s clinic. McHugh would have been an expert witness for the state had
Kline’s case gone forward, and he is still listed as a potential witness in
Morrison’s case.

In June, two weeks before Morrison filed his charges, McHugh sat for a
44-minute interview arranged and recorded by abortion opponents.

McHugh said in the interview, "There’s no psychological condition for
which abortion is the cure."

"We’re talking about the loss of a life, the life of a pain-feeling,
sensory-feeling, fully organized human being," McHugh said of the
late-term abortions. "These are the very kinds of little babies that are
being taken care of in ICUs all around our country."

After the committee reviewed McHugh’s interview, psychologist Douglas Mould,
of Benton, testified that McHugh
trivialized some of the mental problems women with unwanted pregnancies face.
Mould said some potential problems, such as postpartum depression, could be
serious enough to justify an abortion.

A majority of committee members oppose abortion and didn’t seem sympathetic
to his arguments. That was especially true when Mould cited Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who went to prison for drowning her five children in 2001, as a case of
how damaging postpartum depression can be.

"Would have it been better for her five children to have been aborted,
rather than suffer at her hands after they were born?" asked Rep. Mike
O’Neal, a Hutchinson Republican who opposes abortion.

After a pause, Mould answered, "I think that’s a very difficult
question to answer."

Abortion opponents also want to revive Kline’s case in court. On Wednesday,
they presented a petition with more than 7,800 signatures, almost three times
the amount necessary, to force a grand jury to convene in Sedgwick County to investigate Tiller.