WICHITA, Kan. — In one of the nation’s most hotly fought abortion battles, angry political rhetoric has made riveting headlines and captured public attention.

But a key figure in the fight must remain silent.

The fight involves leading partial-birth abortionist George Tiller of Kansas and leading psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh, director of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital for 26 years.

McHugh is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and was one of the first members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ National Review Board.

Last Year, Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline charged Tiller with 30 misdemeanors, mostly involving abortions and minors. McHugh was to have been a key expert witness in the case. He has said, “There is no psychological reason for which abortion is the cure.”

But all that’s now history. Kansas has a new attorney general, Paul Morrison, who dropped Kline’s charges against Tiller June 28 and filed 19 new misdemeanor charges of his own.

The 30 dropped charges centered on the psychiatric reasons for partial-birth abortion under Kansas law. Morrison’s new charges center on a technical violation of Kansas abortion law: whether or not Tiller and a physician who referred women to him for abortions were financially and legally independent, as Kansas law requires.

Tiller is one of the busiest partial-birth abortionists in the country. His website advertises that he has aborted “thousands” of babies at seven to nine months of gestation.

“I’ve had dealings with Tiller over the years,” Father Frank Pavone, head of Priests for Life, told the Register in an e-mail. “I’ve prayed at his abortion mill, have attempted to meet with him (but he refused), have kept contact with Kansas officials about his case, and know some of his former employees (like Luhra Tivis, whose testimony includes the description of the oven Tiller has to burn the babies he aborts. She said that when he fired it up, “I could smell the babies burning.”).

Father Pavone continued, “I have an audiotape of Tiller talking to prospective patients. It’s horrifying. He knows these are babies, and has no remorse about killing them. Moreover, he tries to cover his activity in a spiritual cloak by offering baptisms and spiritual rituals. A priest I know in Wichita once got a call from Tiller, requesting baptism for a baby who was scheduled to be aborted. When the priest said he would need to meet with the couple first, Tiller changed his mind. Now he has his own chaplain.”

Tiller declined an interview with the Register, but his lawyers, Lee Thompson and Dan Monnat, provided the Register with a statement. Responding to Morrison’s announcement of the criminal charges, they said Tiller maintains his innocence and intends to continue to provide “high quality health care sought by women in crisis.

“Today’s announcement simply involves a difference of opinion between lawyers regarding unusual technicalities in Kansas abortion law procedure,” the statement said.

Father Pavone said Tiller is the “champion” of the abortion industry in the United States.

Cheryl Sullenger, a senior policy advisor with Operation Rescue, said, “Because of Tiller’s personal wealth, prominence and political clout — he met with Bill Clinton when Clinton was president — a lot of abortionists really depend on him for cover, not just in Kansas but across the country.”

Father Pavone said, “It would be monumental if Tiller were convicted, and the abortion industry knows it. Not only is he one of their champions, but the fact is that the abortion industry knows that state laws prohibiting late abortions are meaningless, because the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on abortion makes a conviction for breaking those laws practically impossible.”

That’s why the battle over the Tiller case in Kansas has been so intense.

Paul Morrison ran against Phill Kline with the Tiller investigation as his primary theme, calling Kline’s case a “witch hunt” and an “invasion of women’s privacy.”

During the election, Morrison benefited to the tune of more than $1 million from independent political expenditures by Planned Parenthood, and various charities they established to defeat Kline.

“The law has been clear. The evidence has been clear. This investigation has been legitimate from the beginning,” Kline said. “The noise level generated by name-calling backed by millions of dollars of abortion monies has not been able to silence the truth revealed in the evidence that I obtained.” 

Ashley Anstaett, Morrison’s spokeswoman, said he dropped those charges because Kline’s case was seriously flawed and based partly on incorrect or incomplete information.

“The call to re-file Kline’s original 30 charges is misinformed and irresponsible,” Anstaett told reporters. “The case was not organized, summarized and ready to go, as Kline claims.” 

What McHugh Saw

Before Morrison dropped Kline’s charges against Tiller and filed his own, McHugh — went public with what he had seen in Tiller’s records — in defense of psychiatry.

Tiller’s website says he specializes in second- and third-trimester abortions. But abortions of viable babies can be committed in Kansas only to save the mother’s life or if having the baby would cause “substantial and irreversible” damage to a “major bodily function” of the mother, which has been interpreted to include the mother’s mental health.

It’s over those two words, substantial and irreversible, that Kline charged Tiller may have crossed the line and broken the law.

When McHugh was asked by Kline to examine Tiller’s subpoenaed records, he found that some women had gotten abortions [from Tiller] for the most trivial excuses, from “I won’t be able to go to concerts” to “I won’t be able to take part in sports.”

“I can only tell you that from those records, anybody could have gotten an abortion [from Tiller] if they had wanted one,” McHugh said in a 44-minute video interview set up by Women Influencing the Nation and available on the Internet at operationrescue.org.

McHugh was especially concerned that Tiller’s records were too sketchy and inadequate for “laying out a psychiatric plan.”

“And it’s a psychiatric plan that’s needed here,” the psychiatrist stated.

Specifically, Tiller needed to establish that the woman had substantial irreversible psychiatric problems that could be cured by an abortion.

Tiller aborted some babies on the grounds that their mothers suffered from depression or anxiety disorder. But McHugh stated that neither of these conditions is substantial or irreversible.

“These are conditions that we psychiatrists deal with all the time,” he said in the interview.

One woman in Tiller’s records said she would think more about committing suicide if she had the baby, and this reason was taken at face value that an abortion was in order.

But, in fact, McHugh said, “being pregnant and being the mother of a child up until about age 1 actually reduces the suicide risk of women by three- to eightfold. Not many people know that even though it’s substantiated in the medical literature.”

Exactly what sort of psychiatric condition would cause substantial and irreversible damage to a woman if she had her baby?

The very question points to another problem with Tiller’s records and Kansas abortion law as it’s now written.

In the interview, McHugh stated that there is, in fact, “no psychological condition for which abortion is the cure.”

On June 12, when McHugh was scheduled to take part in a panel discussion at an Overland Park hotel, Morrison stationed men outside the hotel to hand-deliver a hotly worded three-page letter to McHugh, threatening the psychiatrist with legal action if he spoke about what he had seen in Tiller’s abortion records.

 McHugh continues to remain silent about the case and refuses to talk to reporters. Efforts to reach him for this story failed.

Sue Ellin Browder is based in

Willits, California.