Witch Hunting in Kansas: Anti-Abortion Pols Pile on to Attack Doctor Who Aided Tiller in Keeping Abortion Available

… [Dr. Ann Kristin] Neuhaus wishes that she’d skipped the hearing.

“[Assistant Kansas Attorney General] Maxwell lied to me,” she says. “That’s how he got the records. And that’s how the charges were filed. And that’s how the trial happened. And that’s how Dr. Tiller got killed. That whole sequence of events was predicated on criminal behavior on the part of the [AG’s] office. Perjury is criminal. A lawyer is not allowed to lie at any time. He said to me, ‘I’m not going to take your records.’ When I walk in the door, he says, ‘I’m taking your records.’ And what choice do I have? I can take my box and try to run. Or I can go to jail. And if I go to jail, they still have my records. They literally cornered me and they avoided due process, and nobody’s done a fucking thing about it.”

— Justin Kendall
The state of Kansas is still chasing one of the last links to Dr. Tiller
The Pitch, 29 Nov. 2011

UPDATE: At the hearing, Judge Theis ruled that Neuhaus did not have to pay the extortionate court costs. He reached that decision after the attorney for the Board of Healing Arts conceded that the board had never levied such a penalty in the past and had never required posting of the amount in advance of an appeal of its decisions in the past, and after the judge himself said he had never in his decades on the bench seen such a thing done. However, Neuhaus was required to sign a promise to pay the $93,000 in full if she loses the appeal — a draconian action that was the same as voluntarily signing herself and her family into bankruptcy. Anyone who wants to stand in support of Dr. Neuhause, Mike Caddell and their principled fight against the Kansas witch hunters, should send a check to the address at the end of this article. — Dave Lindorff, TCHB!

Thursday, 15 Nov. 2012, former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline will be appearing before the Kansas Supreme Court in Topeka, to make arguments for keeping his state law license. Pro-choice organizations have largely remained silent as the large “pro-life” forces howl against the judges. Five judges of the highest court in Kansas have recused themselves from hearing the proceeding.

Friday, 16 Nov., 2012, attorneys for Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus will appear at the Shawnee County District Court before Hon. Franklin Theis to argue that due process for the doctor be given and an onerous $93,000 cash bond be waived. The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts having stripped her of the state license to practice medicine, now demands payment of the fee, in full, before the judge hears her defense attorneys. Four of the nine practicing physicians on the board recused themselves from taking her medical license, this fact that has not been reported in the Kansas news.

More than twenty years ago I obtained a secret recording from an anonymous source of a meeting at a Johnson County restaurant, where known members of the “pro-life” movement debated the Army of God instructions to kidnap abortion providers and cut off their thumbs.

Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, targeted by anti-abortion zealots for helping to keep abortion safe and available in KansasDr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, targeted by anti-abortion zealots for helping to keep abortion safe and available in Kansas

Several voices of those attending the meeting had signed public petitions demanding the “justifiable homicide” of physicians and nurses involved in pregnancy terminations, at any stage of gestation. When I shared the tape recording with law enforcement officers, none would take it for investigation because those discussing kidnapping and mutilating abortion doctors did not name any particular “target.”

I offer these observations in the hope that people know that state and church sponsored terror exists in Kansas and is flourishing with Gov. Sam Brownback and his extreme conservative majority in the state legislature.

Knowing former AG Phill Kline trolls these pages, I would like to extend my warmest regards toward his own special place in the dark ages of reaction in Kansas history. He and his many supporters in this state have solidified its reputation as a backwater reservoir of Know Nothing, Bible-beating, superstitious slobs across the country.

Former AG Phill Kline knew all along that fetal tissue samples were stored at all the clinics in Kansas, and that any law enforcement officer with the proper papers could have obtained those samples to establish DNA proof positive of the fatherhood of the rape or incest victims. This was seldom, if ever, reported in any Kansas newsmedia.

Every female who sought an abortion in Kansas that Kline investigated had previously contacted the appropriate jurisdictional authorities, or the victim’s allegations of rape and incest were already being actively investigated. All the grand juries, show trials against abortion doctors, patient record seizures and surveillance conducted at Kansas taxpayer expense by the state never uncovered or brought to light a single victim of rape or incest that was not reported. This was seldom, if ever, reported in any Kansas news media.

Former Kansas AG Phill Kline’s apparent motivations clearly have more to do with shaming and demonizing the persons he has investigated, including the caregivers, and publicly identifying the patients treated and cured in abortion clinics across Kansas, all in order to further, at their expense, his national reputation in the “pro-life” movement.

After months of grand jury proceedings at the state and county level, and after a series of raids at Kansas clinics, conducted with the collaboration of certain “pro-life” members of the Kansas
judiciary, then AG Kline in the style of another extreme conservative before him, Sen. Joe McCarthy, narrowed his “investigation” into a formal “Inquisition” on a “targeted” number of patients who had been treated and cured by those in practice at Dr. George Tiller’s Wichita,
Ks. clinic.

Everyone in the clinics, who had already endured decades of extra-legal harassments and threats from protesters and terrorist sympathizers in Kansas, has lived in the ultimate fear of state government-sponsored regulatory prosecutions.

Then former Kansas AG Phill Kline had his agents sequester in Topeka my sweetheart Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, who was deceived into presenting unredacted patient files (under a false promise of confidentiality) and who was simultaneously placed under a gag order with the threat of immediate imprisonment if she disclosed Kline’s draconian methods in obtaining her
confidential patient medical files, which were literally ripped from her hands in his star chamber.

Months later, in an emergency meeting held in a Johnson County megachurch, after AG Phill Kline had failed to win re-election, he was appointed by members of the Kansas Republican Party to be Johnson County district attorney, in which post he continued filing charges against Planned Parenthood, located in Overland Park, Ks.

Meanwhile his successor as state attorney general, Paul Morrison, a Republican – turned – Democrat, had agents in Topeka and Wichita use the seized records from Dr. Neuhaus
against Dr. George Tiller in one of the most outrageous criminal trials to take place in Kansas history.

The trial had Dr. Neuhaus declared by the state to be a “hostile witness,” which led to a quick decision by the jury in finding Dr. Tiller not guilty in less than one hour. However the course of that failed show trial led another zealot, Scott Roeder, who sat next to Operation Rescue leader Troy Newman through the length of the proceedings, two months later to shoot Tiller to death in his church.

Former AG Phill Kline scandalized the clinics and the doctors, terrorizing the patients who came for treatment (and were cured), threatened and coerced staff and doctors with meaningless queries into the patients’ identities, and then had his poorly organized agents playfully throw around the medical records from Kinko’s in Johnson County, later storing them in unsecured storage bins in cars, unattended garages and on their own dining tables.

His demagoguery, publicity stunts and “pro-life” movement cronyism is a fitting example of just how low these hypocritical creeps will stoop to destroy people’s lives.

None of the people in this backward religious cult movement deserve the Kansas public’s approval, or support. My sweetheart of over 27 years, Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, a member of our family, did not deserve his violation of her civil rights and his continued persecutions. He and his idiotic, sanctimonious followers and supporters represent most of what is “the matter with Kansas.”

Nothing Kline and his fellow Kansans have done, or will do in the future, can refute the reality that over ten thousand women had a second chance at controlling their biological lives, and not one of them complained about the healing work Dr. Neuhaus courageously did for them.

It took Kline and a convicted clinic bomber to bring her down, and a bullet from one of their acolytes to kill Dr. Tiller. His rabid minions, including Gov. Sam Brownback, are all in this together, no matter what blustering nonsense their agents’ press releases pump out to the compliant news media.

Dr.Neuhaus, the sole surviving doctor in Kansas among those who worked closely with Dr. George Tiller for over a decade last July, was stripped of her state medical license in a politically motivated attack by Brownback political appointees of the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts (KSBHA).

KSBHA agents flew in from Georgetown University a psychiatrist, who stated under oath that she could not imagine a mental health condition that would warrant an abortion, under any circumstances. This purported “expert witness” cost the Kansas taxpayers over $70,000 to arrive at this opinion, which strangely anticipated failed Missouri Republican senate candidate Todd Akin’s notorious “legitimate” rape election campaign assertion.

Now zombies of the “pro-life” movement on the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, which licenses the state’s medical professionals, will be attempting this Friday, 16 Nov. 2012 to thwart justice yet again by trying to force Dr. Kris Neuhaus to pay $93,000 in court “costs,” even before Shawnee County District Court Judge Theis can adjudicate her attorney’s opening briefs.

Present day Kansas regulations of abortion clinics mandate the exact square footage the janitor’s closet must have, among many other restrictions, but perhaps the most hysterical was passed by Gov. Brownback and his state lawmakers last year . It protected the “religious freedoms” of pharmacists, nurses and physicians, giving them the “right” to deny reproductive health care to anybody.

No money, no justice, no peace … and damn little responsible journalism in Kansas.

Welcome to Brownbackistan!

Michael Caddell & Kristin Neuhaus
Radio Free Kansas
17127 Osage Rd.
Nortonville, KS. 66060

Prairie rebel Michael Caddell lives on a farm in North Jefferson County, Kansas, where he publishes the online Fightin’ Cock Flyer, and hosts and produces the kick-ass Radio Free Kansas.