These zealots believe that 10 year old girls should be forced to give birth
by digby
Katha Pollit tells the story of a brave doctor who performed abortions in Kansas --- and the anti-abortion fanatics who destroyed her:
You would not think ... that a convicted clinic bomber would have a lot of traction with a state medical board. In Kansas, however, Cheryl Sullenger was able to set in motion a case against Dr. Tiller’s former colleague, Dr. Ann Kristin Neuhaus, that in 2012 took away her license to practice medicine, and has driven her to the brink of financial ruin, and may well stick her with the entire cost of the proceedings against her—a whopping $92,672—should she lose her appeal. Was Sullenger a patient of Dr. Neuhaus who had been injured? The parent or spouse of one? No. She is a senior policy adviser to Operation Rescue who served two years in prison for trying to blow up a clinic in California in 1987, and whose phone number was found in the car of Dr. Tiller’s assassin, Scott Roeder. In Kansas, you see, anyone can bring a case against any doctor, and the anti-choice movement takes full advantage of that legal quirk. And so it came about that the clinic bomber drove a compassionate, caring doctor out of medicine and into near-bankruptcy.
This is a tragic story of a woman run out of the medical profession for performing an abortion on a 10 year old girl. Evidently the forced childbirth sadists on the medical board were unpersuaded that it was medically necessary. A 10 year old girl! If you have ever doubted that these people care about fetuses far more than they care about people who are already born, this should put that to rest.
Meanwhile, Pollit reports that Neuhaus has been driven to bankruptcy:
When I caught up with Dr. Neuhaus by phone, she was driving twenty miles to her mother’s house to do laundry: her washing machine had broken down and she couldn’t afford the repair bill. Between the mortgage and the health insurance required for her son’s Type 1 diabetes, there’s no money for basic maintenance on the isolated farmhouse she shares with her husband, Mike Caddell, and son in Nortonville. To top it off, her car needs $1,000 worth of repairs, so she has had to borrow her mother’s. We talked about the stress that abortion providers are under in Kansas: at one time, Dr. Neuhaus wore a bulletproof vest and carried a gun.
“Sometimes I think I have PTSD,” she said with a laugh. “At the core, I’m a fighter—but I’ve been injured, too.” Still, she forges on: having earned a master’s in public health, she is now working as a researcher at the University of Kansas. One way or another, Dr. Neuhaus will be taking care of people’s health needs. But she won’t be involved in abortions, she says. Even if she gets back her license, Operation Rescue has driven yet another provider from the field.
Their job is done. They must be so proud. I wonder that by their own beliefs, they are going to hell?
Pollit and others are collecting money to help:
Donate online at Indiegogo.com/projects/dr-neuhaus,, or mail checks made out to Ann K. Neuhaus to me at The Nation and I will forward them. You won’t be helping just one person; you will be sending a message of support to every provider. If we let good, brave physicians be destroyed by the Cheryl Sullengers and the Phill Klines, who will do the difficult, dangerous but necessary work of abortion care?
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