Yesterday it was revealed that disgraced Kansas City abortionist Krishna Rajanna had thrown, into a school recycling bin, abortion patient records with extensive personal-identifying information while those files were still legally required to be retained and protected. (See KC Star here and here)
Rajanna was a failed surgical internist who came to do abortions at the Aid for Women Clinic in the inner-city area of Kansas City, Kansas. Following wage disputes with abortionist co-owners Malcolm Knarr and Sherman Zaremski, Rajanna opened his own “Affordable Abortions” competing clinic 3 blocks away from Aid for Women.
In 2003, after former governor Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill to regulate abortion facilities, one of Rajanna’s staff secretly took photos of the clinic’s outrageous sanitation and safety violations. Open drug syringes and fetal parts were stored in the staff lunch refrigerator. Patients records were in open boxes on the floor in the kitchen. Two police officers who were called to the clinic for a robbery report, refused to sit in the roach-infested clinic.
The local District Attorney could not get the state Board of Healing Arts to inspect the clinic premises, even though the Board had already privately issued disciplinary sanctions against Rajanna, and were aware of a wrongful death lawsuit against him for drug overdosing was progressing in the court.
In April 2004, AG Phill Kline held a press conference, revealing the whistle-blower’s photos and begging legislators on both sides of the abortion issue to come together to halt such dangerous practitioners, but the Senate president, Dave Kerr stymied resuscitation of the past-vetoed clinic licensure bill.
Under Board director Larry Buening, a pal of George Tiller, the Rajanna investigation continued to be muzzled until 2 things happened in 2005– a Texas teen died at Tiller’s clinic from a late-term abortion, and then-governor Kathleen Sebelius was trying to suppress the resurrected clinic licensure bill.
It was at this point, that Buening decided to help Sebelius by pulling a spot inspection on Rajanna and “emergency revoking” Rajanna to show that the state was indeed removing bad practitioners and didn’t need a licensing bill.
At that time, Kansans for Life was at every public Board meeting, including a hearing where Rajanna whined that the state had no right to complain about rodents and filth they had found at his clinic during an unannounced inspection, since they had promised to notify him before inspections!
Eventually, Rajanna lost his Kansas medical license and closed the abortion business.
This is the all-too-typical profile of an abortionist–a failed medical practitioner who “trains” at a local clinic, but uses his/her medical license to make money doing abortions.
Two abortion businesses– Aid for Women and the Overland Park Center for Women’s Health– secured an injunction against a state abortion facility licensure bill passed in 2011. How ironic that one of the lawsuit’s complaints is that it is a violation of patient privacy for the state health agency to be permitted to inspect clinics and records twice annually, including one visit without notice!
Even more ironic is that the issue of record privacy is coming to the forefront on Thursday in Overland Park where a criminal hearing will reconvene on Planned Parenthood. It was last halted when the state of Kansas discovered that evidentiary abortion reports had been shredded by two state agencies. Thus, abortion documents were shredded that should have been retained while abortion patient records from Rajanna that were to be held in confidence were made accessible to the public.
LifeNews.com Note: Kathy Ostrowski is the legislative director for Kansans for Life, a statewide pro-life group.
