Kansas Inquisition

Kansas Atty. Gen. Phill Kline’s opposition to abortion is apparently so all-consuming that not even truth, common decency or the U.S. Constitution will stand in his way.

Taking a page from former U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, Kline has ordered two family planning clinics to hand over complete medical files on 90 female patients, including teenage girls. He says his aims are twofold: to determine, first, whether teens were victims of statutory rape that their treating physicians failed to report and, second, whether the clinics violated Kansas law barring abortions on fetuses that might be viable, unless the pregnancy threatens a woman’s health. Most physicians consider a fetus viable after roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy.

If he gets his hands on those files, here’s what Kline will learn about each patient: her name, address and phone number; how many sexual partners she’s had; the birth control she’s used; her prior medical history; any psychological problems noted in her file; and, of course, the details of her pregnancy.

Let’s assume for the moment that Kline has reason to suspect wrongdoing by clinic doctors. Kansas law already makes doctors report every abortion after 22 weeks of pregnancy to state authorities -- one of a few states with that requirement. That means state officials already have reports, which replace the woman’s name with a number and provide her age, race, the age of the fetus and evidence to sustain the medical necessity for the abortion. Without evidence that doctors broke the law or that their mandated reports were inadequate, what legitimate reason does Kline have to seek more information? And if his aim is to punish negligent physicians, why has he refused the clinics’ requests to shield the patients’ identities and remove extraneous personal information?

Kline won’t say. As a result, his order seems nothing more than an inquisition, an effort to humiliate women, hound clinic doctors and scare off those seeking abortions.

Ashcroft tried the same disgraceful gambit last year, subpoenaing medical files in retaliation for a lawsuit filed to block the federal late-term abortion ban. He backed down only because federal judges wouldn’t support him and because many people, regardless of their views on abortion, cringed at the prospect of government lawyers pawing through their private records in service of one man’s partisan crusade.

In Kansas, Kline has help from a state court judge whose views are equally extreme and who, like Kline, refuses to acknowledge constitutional guarantees of privacy. District Judge Richard Anderson has rejected the clinics’ repeated efforts to block this pernicious fishing expedition. The last hope for these clinics and their patients is the Kansas Supreme Court, where an appeal is pending. We hope the justices on that court will educate the attorney general on the law, not to mention the morality of conscripting vulnerable women into his ideological war.