Fishing for Abortion Records in Kansas
by TChris
The Attorney General of Kansas, Phill Kline, is acting as an anti-abortion activist rather than the state's chief law enforcement officer. (TalkLeft background here.) And he's willing to undermine the Constitution and the privacy rights of patients to get what he wants.
What he wants: records of abortions performed on more than 90 patients in two Kansas clinics. Kline claims the records may reveal evidence of a crime, although the nature of his investigation is elusive. He couches the effort in appealing terms: a search for evidence of child molestation. The records, he claims, may show that girls too young to give legal consent to sex were victimized by older men. But the records are more likely to show that the underage girls themselves committed crimes by having sex with underage boys. And the physician-patient privilege that Kline wants to thwart is designed to encourage patients to share just that kind of personal information with doctors, free from fear that a crusading prosecutor will obtain and use that information against the patient.
That Kline isn't out to protect kids is clear from two facts.
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