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Mm, Mm Good

Startling allegations against an abortion doctor have been the centerpiece of two years of legislative warfare in Kansas.

By Allie Johnson 

Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline has received national attention for his high-profile fight against abortion. He's vigorously defended his attempt to wrest control of the medical records of women who had abortions at two Kansas clinics. His unprecedented subpoena for the records has made him far more visible than any Kansas attorney general in recent memory.

But last year, Kline made an even more startling attack on abortion that received little attention in Kansas City. The Wichita Eagle was apparently the only newspaper that reported Kline's April 29, 2004, offensive, which then became fodder for Web sites, some of which reveled in the bizarre nature of Kline's accusations.

Kline, speaking to Kansas legislators who were considering how best to regulate abortion providers, told his audience about a filthy Kansas City, Kansas, clinic, which he said should convince lawmakers that more regulation was needed. Kline presented photographs depicting a cluttered, unsanitary medical office. And he also provided a police officer's affidavit, which made a stunning claim: that workers at the clinic believed its proprietor, a physician named Krishna Rajanna, had kept aborted fetuses in Styrofoam cups in a freezer and later heated them up and stirred them into his lunch.

The Eagle's story carried a denial from Rajanna, whose license has since been revoked. His clinic has closed. But for the past year, Rajanna's dirty abortion clinic has been at the center of a legislative battle -- used, curiously enough, by both sides in the fight over whether to increase regulation of clinics or keep oversight at its present level.

Rajanna's clinic has repeatedly come up in news stories about the regulation fight in the past year. But since Kline's public accusation in the Legislature, the shocking notion that Rajanna's workers accused him of eating fetuses has been dropped from news coverage.

Even Kline hasn't made any more of it, despite what appears to be its great potential as a boon to abortion opponents.

It was a report of a theft that brought Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department detectives William Howard Jr. and Steven Mansaw to a clinic called Affordable Medical & Surgical at 1030 Central Avenue in September 2003.

The clinic's physician, Rajanna, claimed that $1,000 had been stolen from the clinic's office.

Howard says he was shocked by the conditions that he and Mansaw found. There were dirty dishes in the sink and on a tabletop. Trash was strewn around. Roaches crawled across countertops.

"There was an unfamiliar type stench in the room. Frankly, I was reluctant to sit down," he wrote in a notarized affidavit.

Howard masked his disgust and stuck to the business at hand -- the alleged theft. Rajanna told him that he suspected one or more employees had taken the money from a sack he kept in the unlocked back office.

Howard tells the Pitch that the doctor's financial records were in such disarray that he and Mansaw weren't able to verify that a theft had occurred. But while they were interviewing clinic employees about the missing money, one young clinic staff member, Julia Walton Garcia, made a chilling allegation: Rajanna, she told Howard, had eaten fetuses.

Howard states in his affidavit that Garcia said Rajanna kept aborted fetuses in Styrofoam containers in the freezer in his office. "Julia went on to describe how she and the other girls actually witnessed Rajanna microwave one of the aborted fetuses and stir it into his lunch. Julia claimed that she shared this with some of the other employees, who confirmed that they had seen him do the very same thing," Howard wrote.

Howard was so disturbed that he took Garcia to the office of Nick Tomasic, then the district attorney for Wyandotte County.

"I cautioned her," Howard tells the Pitch. "I said, 'Lying to me is one thing. I'm a cop -- people lie to me all the time. But lying to the DA's office, you could find yourself in a whole lot of trouble." Howard says he told Garcia that she could be prosecuted. But seated in Tomasic's office, Garcia told the same story.

However, what Garcia described was not actually criminal, so Tomasic could do nothing. He suggested that Garcia file complaints with state regulatory agencies and e-mailed Howard a few phone numbers to pass on to her. Howard himself called the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the agency in charge of licensing doctors and other health professionals in Kansas.

"The lady just said, 'Yeah, we get a lot of complaints about him,'" Howard says.

A month earlier, Garcia had wandered into the Pregnancy Resource Center, a counseling office on Central Avenue, a few blocks from Rajanna's clinic.

Eugene Frye had opened the center that summer across the street from another abortion clinic, which he and other anti-abortion protesters regularly picketed.

Frye had hoped that setting up shop across the street from an abortion clinic would bring in women for free pregnancy tests and religious counseling to deter them from having abortions.

Garcia came in looking for someone to talk to about Rajanna's clinic, Frye says. The single mother of a toddler had worked at the clinic for about a year when she learned that she was pregnant again. (Repeated efforts by the Pitch to locate Garcia were unsuccessful.)

"She said, 'I work for Rajanna, and he's going to fire me because I'm pregnant. He says he can't have pregnant girls working at an abortion clinic. I feel he's doing me wrong,'" Frye tells the Pitch. Frye says Garcia complained that Rajanna sometimes shorted his employees on their paychecks. "She was pretty upset with him," Frye says.

But Frye says Garcia seemed almost apologetic when she told him that she and other employees suspected Rajanna was eating fetuses. "She said, 'I can't prove it, but we all think that's what he's doing.'"

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