Former Kansas representative Mary Pilcher Cook has helped me understand why the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on “certain types of late term abortions” won’t matter as much in Kansas as one might hope:
Tiller kills [unborn children] by shooting digoxin into their hearts and delivering them dead now. That’s why the 1998-99 year of stats will show a high number of PBAs and the next year there were zero. If Tiller is ever prosecuted with the records that Kline had subpoenaed, it would reveal that mental health does not have anything to do with a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.
(According to Pilcher Cook, Phill Kline’s immediate predecessor as Kansas attorney general, Carla Stovall, had ”issued an opinion in 1999 that a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function included ‘mental health.’”) Mary Kay Culp, State Executive Director, Kansans for Life, wrote in to offer a similar correction: “They are late term abortions but performed in another way.”
Anyway, I guess this would explain the silence of the Wichita Eagle and other newspapers in the state: Tiller doesn’t partially deliver a live baby; he gets them where they live. So the court’s decision just doesn’t concern the Kansas press. Therefore, Pilcher Cook tells me, Tiller’s money will continue to flow into Kansas politics and Kansas Democrats will continue to be a lot safer than several hundred nearly- but not partially-born other people.