The pro-life movement has a hero in Phill Kline, the former Attorney General of Kansas, who crusaded, among other things, against Wichita’s notorious abortion clinic that specializes in late-term, partial-birth abortions (that is to say, infanticide). Columnist Robert Novak tells about how the abortion industry targeted him for defeat:
That industry pumped an estimated $1.5 million into the 2006 campaign of Paul Morrison, the pro-choice Republican Johnson County district attorney who turned Democratic to run against Kline for attorney general. Tiller contributed $121,000 to his own ProKanDo PAC, which spent $322,680 in the campaign. An affiliated nonprofit group, Kansans for Consumer Privacy Protection, spent more than $400,000 on “educational mailings” obviously targeting Kline. Badly outspent, Kline relied on an old-fashioned handshaking campaign and was swamped at the polls.
Then came a bizarre event worthy of Shakespeare. Since Morrison had been elected district attorney as a Republican, under state law his replacement was selected by the GOP’s precinct committeemen. They chose Kline. The abortion lobby’s campaign against him had made him unelectable to any office, ruling out election to a full term as district attorney next year. With time short, he immediately set to work.
From this post in suburban Kansas City, Mr. Kline has opened up a new tactic in the abortion wars: going after the biggest abortion-cliinic franchiser, Planned Parenthood. Kline is charging the group with a multitude of offenses:
His 107 charges against Planned Parenthood include allegations of “unlawful late-term abortions,” “unlawful failure to determine viability for late-term abortion,” “making false information” and “unlawful failure to maintain records.” Antiabortion activists see Kline’s prosecution as the springboard for a national campaign. Forty other states have abortion laws similar to the Kansas statute that says abortion is legal only when the fetus cannot live independently outside the mother’s womb — that is, when it is not “viable.”
That is a big opening, since medical science is pushing back that time further and further. Phill Kline is a reminder that pro-lifers must never give up, that defeats may not be permanent and that new fronts in the battle are always opening up. And, I would add, that God has a hand in all of this.
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