“Horses are my life and having kids would mess that up for barrel racing,” so said a 15 year-old who hoped to abort the healthy, viable baby that she had already carried for more than six months.



The year was 2003. Our confused little cowgirl had come, alas, to the right place, Dr. George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, the world capital of late term abortions. Tiller promptly invoked the Kansas “rodeo exception” to the state prohibition on late term abortions. A second physician, Dr. Ann Kristin ( Kris) Neuhaus, confirmed the rodeo exception, and the baby was executed with the utmost privacy, and all for only about $6,000.



Unfortunately, the only false detail in the story above is the rodeo exception. One can excuse the girl in question for thinking there was one, but there was not. To abort her baby, Tiller had to ignore the state’s tough abortion laws. This he could do in 2003, and for the next six years, only through the protection of his political patron, then governor, now Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius.



The perverse details of Tiller’s practice finally came to light this past week not through a hard-hitting media investigation or a criminal probe, but through an anodyne and under-reported Kansas Board of Healing Arts hearing into Neuhaus’s confirmation protocol.



According to actual Kansas law in 2003, a doctor could abort a healthy, viable baby only if he and a second independent physician agreed that the abortion would prevent the mother from suffering a “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” or save her life.



Thus, for the official state record, Tiller interpreted the hurt that might accompany the temporary loss of barrel racing as “substantial and irreversible.” Neuhaus, after a 15 or so-minute review using a computer-generated answer tree, gave the girl her official diagnosis, “major depression, single episode.” And this girl at least got a review. In one case discussed at the hearing, Neuhaus approved the abortion a week after it took place.