TOPEKA, February 28, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Further cracks were made in the prosecutor’s narrative that former Attorney General Phill Kline acted without regard to patient privacy on day six of Kline’s ethics trial.
Reporting from Topeka, Jill Stanek spoke with LifeSiteNews.com by telephone this afternoon; she said that Kline revealed on the witness stand that he authored a bill protecting the identities of victims of sexual assault during his time as a state representative in the Kansas House.
That law created an exception in Kansas’s open records act, which at the time did not protect victims of sex abuse from public identification. Kline’s bill created privacy for victims, Stanek told LSN, by redacting their names from the state reporting files.
Stanek also told LSN that Kline’s testimony showed an opposite attitude to that of George Tiller, the late-term abortionist investigated by Kline for failure to report child rape and illegal late-term abortions on post-viable unborn infants.
She reported that Kansas statutes allowed abortion providers to develop their own coding when submitting abortion reports to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). Kline testified that Tiller used the initials of his abortion patients plus the date of the abortion to develop the code for each reported abortion. That potentially identifying information, while not public, is still on file with KDHE.
Kline said he found this out because one of Tiller’s patients came forward to his office, and they were able to match the name and date of the abortion to that person.
In an effort to derail the former AG’s criminal investigation into Tiller’s failure to report child rape, the late abortionist had accused Kline of wanting to publicize the names of women patients.
But other evidence shows that Tiller himself had violated patient privacy for the sake of fundraising for his ProKanDo PAC.
A policy that had been posted on his website reportedly told clients: “In connection with any fundraising, we may disclose to our fundraising staff demographic information about you (e.g. your name, address and phone number) and dates of health care that we provided you.”
That paragraph had been posted on the site as early as June 2003 until February 2005, when Kansans for Life director Mary Kay Culp brought up the issue, and reporters started asking questions, according to a number of posts on Kansas Meadowlark.
LSN has been informed that while the internet cache of Tiller’s website has been scrubbed, a screenshot of the website is still available. It will be linked as soon as LSN receives it.