Kansas Pro-Life Group: Focus on Planned Parenthood, Abortion Not Phill Kline
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
September 22, 2009
Topeka, KS (LifeNews.com) — A Kansas pro-life group says the media’s focus in a case surrounding possible illegal late-term abortions at a local Planned Parenthood should be on the abortion business. Instead, the media has been focusing on a former Attorney General Phill Kline and a staffer who faces ethics charges.
Stanton Hazlett, the disciplinary administrator for the Board for Discipline of Attorneys, says he has ethics complaints against Kline he is prepared to release in the next 30 to 45 days.
The complaints center on Kline’s investigation of the Overland Park-based Planned Parenthood, which is alleged to have done illegal late-term abortions and falsified medical papers related to them.
On Monday, Hazlett released a complaint against Kline’s former assistant attorney general Stephen Maxwell. It claims Maxwell misled a judge and grand jury in the investigations.
He is also preparing to release ethics complaints against Kline’s former deputy attorney general Eric Rucker.
Kline responded to the ethics charges in an email to the Associated Press, saying, "He doesn’t deserve this kind of vindictive prosecution motivated by political considerations. Someday, the full story of what has transpired behind closed doors in Kansas will come out.”
Kline, also the former Johnson County District Attorney, filed 107 charges, including 23 felonies, against the abortion business for allegedly violating state law.
The complaints revolve around district court Judge Richard Anderson allowing Kline to receive medical records from Planned Parenthood.
Judge Anderson originally validated Kline’s access to the files and testified he had reason to believe documents filed by Planned Parenthood with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment had been falsified before Kline’s investigation while he was attorney general.
The records showed, according to Anderson, that the age of the babies involved in the abortions had been altered to hide the fact that Planned Parenthood was engaging in illegal late-term abortions.
The complaints say Kline and his assistants knowingly misrepresented information to get Judge Anderson to order the release of abortion records. It also says Maxwell and others removed those records from the attorney general’s office during Kline’s last days in office and copied them for Kline in his eventual position as district attorney.
The Board for the Discipline of Attorneys will hold a hearing February 17 and 18 to hear arguments and consider possible punishment.
But Mary Kay Culp, the head of Kansans for Life, tells LifeNews.com that the focus is on the wrong people.
She says it should be on the Kansas Supreme Court, which has instituted a gag order preventing Judge Anderson from commenting.
"For five months the Kansas Supreme Court has kept in place an indefensible gag order on a judge, and has denied state evidence to prosecutors in the Planned Parenthood case," she said.
"Every time this Court has interposed itself in abortion clinic prosecutions and grand juries, the pro-life, pro-justice position has won, but the Court feels impelled to slap Kline around as a sop to the abortion industry," Culp added.
Culp also said the ethics complaints "do not read like an impartial legal assessment, but like the rant of [abortion] clinic defense attorneys, or one of the administrator’s own Supreme Court bosses (Kline-opponent) Justice Carole Beier," she said.
"By citing actions that violate no code, it furthers the myth that abortion clinic prosecutions are irredeemably poisoned. Abortion supporters promised they would pursue every venue to punish Kline for having the temerity to investigate crime at Kansas abortion clinics, and this is part of it," she added.
"The abortion supporters’ task is clear: muddy the waters, tell the public their medical privacy is in jeopardy, ignore the groundless gag put on an ethical judge and tar and feather Maxwell," she concluded.
Related web sites:
Kansans for Life – https://www.KFL.org
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