Dr. Allen Palmer, a contract Planned Parenthood abortionist, told the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts that he relied on the clinics’s employees to tell him whether the patient was younger than 14. Palmer is scrambling to keep his license.
The girl in question was 13. The man who impregnated her was 19. The AP article describes their sex as “consensual,” which legally it cannot be. The abortion took place at Planned Parenthood’s Comprehensive Health facility in December 2014. At the time, Palmer was filling in for a vacationing medical director. The legal problem ensued not because Palmer performed the abortion but because he failed to preserve the unborn baby’s fetal tissue and send it to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation as required by Kansas law.
“I’m as shocked and awed by this failure as anybody here, but they want to hang it on me, and maybe that’s the way it is,” Palmer told the board. “I’m telling you that I did not know and I would not have proceeded if I had known.” Palmer’s attorney argued that Planned Parenthood failed to educate Palmer in the relevant law or to review its policies and procedures regarding minors.
Planned Parenthood is claiming that Palmer “found it unnecessary to familiarize himself in detail with (Kansas) laws requiring the preservation of fetal tissue extracted during an abortion procedure” on a minor.
That Palmer now faces disciplinary action is a testament to the pioneering work done by former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline and the change in state ethos during the Brownback years. The same year, 2002, Kline was elected attorney general of Kansas, Democrat Kathleen Sebelius was elected governor. They had different agendas.
Kline wanted to know how Kansas, despite tough laws he had helped write as a legislator, had emerged as the world capital of late term abortions. Sebelius did not want to know or want anyone else to know either. Kline quickly discovered that abortions performed on under-aged girls were not being reported to the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services (SRS) as mandated by law.
It took Kline years of fighting the Sebelius administration to get the records. They showed that in the years 2002 and 2003 alone, 166 girls under-15 had abortions at Kansas clinics, the great majority of them at George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita or Planned Parenthood’s in Overland Park. Only two of them were reported to the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, and both of those stories were already in the news.
To prevent Kline from moving forward on these cases, the Sebelius administration and the state media, with the Kansas City Star in the lead, colluded to ruin Kline’s political career and drive him from the state. For its efforts, Planned Parenthood awarded the Star its national “Maggie” award for journalistic excellence.
When interviewed by the Sentinel in March of this year, Kline was asked what was his dominant emotion in reflecting on his state service. “Sadness and loss,” said Kline. “Our state betrayed its legacy and ignored the plight of hundreds of children who were the victims of child molestation and rape in order to protect a political policy and position.”