Thread by NYer.
The Planned Parenthood abortion clinic of Overland Park, KS, is currently on trial for 107 counts of falsifying abortion records and committing illegal late-term abortions, 23 of which are felonies.
The charges were brought by former Attorney General Phill Kline in October 2007 following an investigation he launched in 2003.
Today came the bombshell news that the administration of former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, destroyed critical evidence in 2005. The evidence was needed to compare records Kline acquired with records Planned Parenthood later submitted.
From the Kansas City Star:
Key evidence needed to prosecute Planned Parenthood for allegedly falsifying abortion documents has been destroyed by the state, court records show.
Prosecutors have asked a judge to delay a Monday hearing to determine whether there’s enough evidence to try the abortion provider on 23 felony counts of falsifying termination of pregnancy reports.
Prosecutors say the records kept by the state needed to make their case were destroyed in 2005, some two years before criminal charges were brought against Planned Parenthood.
Court records say that Kansas health officials shredded the documents as part of a “routine document destruction.”
It’s impossible to know precisely when it occurred although it is believed to have been done in 2005, when the health department was part of the administration of former Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, an abortion rights supporter….
Abortion opponents were so incredulous about the revelation that they hard to time finding words to describe their reaction.
“Unbelievable,” said Mary Kay Cup [sic], executive director of Kansans for Life. “We don’t believe for one second this was anything but purposefully done to protect the abortion industry.”
The destroyed records were critical in establishing the authenticity of records from 2003 obtained by Kline when he investigated the agency as attorney general. Planned Parenthood later provided copies of the documents that the state contended did not match those Kline had.
Later, as Johnson County district attorney in 2007, Kline filed the 107-count complaint against the agency.
Kline argued at the time that the group had performed illegal late-term abortions and falsified or forged documents to make it appear they were legal.
Prosecutors contended that Planned Parenthood had not kept the documents five years as required by law and falsified copies to cover it up.
Kline subpoenaed the documents in question in the fall of 2004. So their destruction the following year doesn’t look on the up and up, to say the least.
It now becomes more clear why the Kansas Department of Health and Environment strangely but strongly resisted turning over those documents to Kline and also refused to certify the documents Kline had.
Furthermore, Kline’s decision not to inform the Sebelius administration about his investigation appears vindicated. His rationale was that it was Sebelius cronies he was investigating.
That decision was one of the reasons a Sebelius-empowered panel suspended Kline last week.
Thread by me.
UTRECHT, Netherlands, October 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) has released new guidelines for interpreting the 2002 Euthanasia Act that now includes “mental and psychosocial ailments” such as “loss of function, loneliness and loss of autonomy” as acceptable criteria for euthanasia. The guidelines also allow doctors to connect a patient’s lack of “social skills, financial resources and a social network” to “unbearable and lasting suffering,” opening the door to legal assisted death based on “psychosocial” factors, not terminal illness.
The June 2011 position paper, titled “The Role of the Physician in the Voluntary Termination of Life” concludes that the “concept of suffering” is “broader” than its “interpretation and application by many physicians today.”
Included in a broader interpretation of suffering would be “disorders affecting vision, hearing and mobility, falls, confinement to bed, fatigue, exhaustion and loss of fitness,” according to the authors.
“The patient perceives the suffering as interminable, his existence as meaningless and—though not directly in danger of dying from these complaints—neither wishes to experience them nor, insofar as his history and own values permit, to derive meaning from them,” explains the KNMG position paper.
“In the KNMG’s view, such cases are sufficiently linked to the medical domain to permit a physician to act within the confines of the Euthanasia Law.”
“It doesn’t always have to be a physical ailment, it could be the onset of dementia or chronic psychological problems, it’s still unbearable and lasting suffering. It doesn’t always have to be a terminal disease,” said Dr. Nieuwenhuijzen Kruseman, Chairman of KNMG to Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director and International Chair of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition committee responded to the new guidelines, saying that in his view “the expansion of euthanasia and assisted suicide has been constant and deliberate.”
Schadenberg warned that what has happened in the Netherlands can—and will—occur in other jurisdictions, if euthanasia and/or assisted suicide is legalized.
When the Netherlands sanctioned euthanasia for emotionally ill patients in 1994, Karl Gunning, head of the Dutch Doctors’ Union warned the country of the “slippery slope” it was sliding down.
“We have always predicted that once you start looking at killing as a means to solve problems, then you’ll find more and more problems where killing can be the solution,” he said.
Prominent conservative bioethical commentator Wesley J. Smith wondered on his blog how anyone can say that ‘there is no slippery slope’ with the legalization of euthanasia when “loneliness” is now one of the legally recognized factors in the decision to end one’s life.
“Since 1973, when euthanasia was quasi decriminalized, Dutch doctors have gone from euthanizing the terminally ill who ask for it, to the chronically ill who ask for it, to people with disabilities who ask for it, to the mentally anguished who ask for it…And now, they want to target vulnerable and marginalized elderly people.”
“The Culture of Death is voracious. Once it begins to feed, it is never satiated. [T]he categories of the killable [are] never finally enough.”
“This is compassion?” asked Smith rhetorically.