By Dave Andrusko
A Kansas newspaper has confirmed what pro-life Kansans had feared for months: that the abortion clinic once operated by the late George Tiller has been sold. The Wichita Eagle reported yesterday at the Tiller family sold the clinic to the Trust Women Foundation Inc. whose executive director, Julie Burkhart, is a former employee of Tiller.
The Associated Press reported today that, “In a recent advertisement circulated by email to abortion-rights supporters, Trust Women said it was looking for medical staff experienced in first and early-second trimester abortions and planned to open its clinic between mid-November and January 2013.”
And “The building’s sale appears to confirm rumors in Wichita’s anti-abortion community that as many as three abortion providers are planning to set up in the city on at least a part-time basis,” reported Dion Lefler of the Wichita Eagle.
Lefler explained that the company called Kellogg Investments LLC, formerly owned by Tiller’s widow, now has a new owner: Trust Women Foundation. “The new registered agent for Kellogg Investments is Topeka attorney Robert Eye,” Lefler reports.
This is significant because Eye represented Ann Kristin Neuhaus, a former Tiller associate whose medical license was revoked by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts last June. The decision ratified a 2011 decision by administrative judge Edward Gashler which found Neuhaus negligent in conducting mental health exams for 11 patients, ages 10 to 18, who aborted between July and November 2003.
In 2003 Kansas law allowed an abortion of a viable fetus (defined as the 22nd week gestation) only if the woman faces “substantial and irreversible” harm to “a major bodily function” or death. In 2003 that also included mental health. For these post-viability abortions the law required an independent second medical opinion.
Neuhaus provided those second opinions for Tiller, from 1999 to 2006. According to the Associated Press’ John Hanna, “The case centered on how Neuhaus concluded that each of the 11 patients had serious mental health issues and that an abortion was advisable.“
Gashler concluded in February 2011 that “Neuhaus’ records didn’t contain the information necessary to show that she did thorough exams, and the patients’ care was ‘seriously jeopardized,’” Hanna reported.
Reese Hays, the attorney on the board’s litigation team who presented the case against Neuhaus, said, “Her actions clearly show a disregard for her patients’ safety and care, which causes her to be a threat to any future patients she might have.”
Kathy Ostrowski, legislative director for Kansans for Life, said that all eleven young women were in their sixth or seventh month of pregnancy when they met with Neuhaus at the Tiller facility. “Neuhaus was never trained as a psychiatric consultant, and ended up utilizing an online ‘answer tree,’” Ostrowski said. “Evidence from the patient files repeatedly indicated such diagnoses were logged in and completed within 2 to 3 minutes. Thus the teens were able to secure these abortions at a cost of $6,000 or more.”
She added that Neuhaus “performed abortions in various locations in Northeast Kansas from 1993-2002 and was twice declared a ‘danger to the public’ during disciplinary actions taken by the Board in 2000-2001.’
The Tiller clinic has been vacant since June 2009 when Tiller was killed.
Lefler wrote that to reopen as an abortion clinic, it would have to meet health and safety regulations passed by the Kansas legislature, including that at least one of the abortionists has to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the site. However “State officials have been temporarily blocked from enforcing the new regulations by pending lawsuits charging that the rules are excessive and medically unnecessary, violate clinic operators’ due-process rights, and place an undue burden on women seeking abortion services.”
However abortion clinics “are notorious for sending abortion-injured women to the hospital without the necessary first-hand information for accurate emergency treatment–-apparently what happened in an abortion death in the Chicago area this July,” Ostrowski said. “This is the reason that a provision requiring local hospital privileges for itinerant abortionists was passed in 2011 as part of the abortion clinic licensure law. Unfortunately, this law is under injunction and thus not in effect.”
Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, said, “It is tragic Burkhart appears poised to open a clinic that would re-engage in destroying unborn children and exploiting women for money, and not yet subject to our new licensure law due to litigation.”
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