Mm, Mm Good

Then, Attorney General Kline got involved. He made a presentation before the House Federal and State Affairs Committee, saying that the conditions at Rajanna's clinic proved that a licensing law was needed. He called Rajanna's business a "back-alley" clinic. "This is a place where no woman, no person, should have to undergo a medical procedure," Kline said.

Some legislators seized on the fetus-eating allegation.

"His own staff said that he cannibalized human tissue," Mast tells the Pitch. "I have very little doubt in my mind that he did this. I had heard that they do this type of thing in China, but we in America are not ready for this. Why else would he keep them in the freezer?"

But even the tales of fetus eating and Howard's affidavit weren't enough to boost the bill's chances. With the Board of Healing Arts promising to wrap up the Rajanna matter soon, Mast's bill died in committee.

Until about five years ago, Krishna Rajanna performed abortions at Aid for Women, a Central Avenue clinic that sits in a free-standing white building with a manicured lawn and a large, neatly lettered sign that reads "Central Family Medicine."

For years, Eugene Frye, who is in his fifties and owns a small construction business, spent his Saturday mornings outside the clinic with a small group of protesters, holding "Abortion Is Murder" signs with graphic images of mutilated fetuses and shouting to women on their way into the clinic.

"He's very vocal," says Sherman Zaremski, the physician who now runs the clinic. Zaremski, who worked with Rajanna before he left, says Rajanna departed after a falling-out with the clinic's then-owner, Malcolm Knarr. The dispute culminated in a lawsuit in which Rajanna accused Knarr of withholding $4,000 of salary. Rajanna left and opened his own clinic just a few blocks away.

"He is a good surgeon, technically speaking," Zaremski says of Rajanna. "I don't know that there was ever a question about his competence as a physician." Zaremski says he's skeptical about Garcia's charges. Zaremski says it's not unusual to store fetuses in a freezer. "We store a sample of the fetus in the freezer anytime somebody thinks they might prosecute for rape. Not in a Styrofoam cup, but they're sealed, marked and labeled. It's a matter of police chain of evidence," Zaremski says.

But Zaremski tells the Pitch he was not surprised that Rajanna had been disciplined. He says he stopped by Rajanna's clinic one afternoon a few years ago, just to be friendly, and noticed that the procedure room was carpeted -- making it difficult to clean and nearly impossible to sterilize. "No, it didn't surprise me. I saw it myself," Zaremski says.

Jennifer Mulich, one of Rajanna's former clinic employees, downplays the dirty conditions. "The place ain't nothing fancy," she tells the Pitch. "It's 10th and Central, for God's sakes."

Mulich, who is out of a job now that the clinic is closed, says a lot of poor women were upset when the clinic shut its doors. At $290 for an abortion -- and a sale price of $250 on Wednesdays -- Rajanna was one of the least costly abortion providers in town. "This is going to sound terrible, but we had a lot of repeat customers," she says.

Mulich defends Rajanna, saying that the fetus-eating allegations are simply untrue. She says some employees -- including Garcia -- fabricated stories about Rajanna because they disliked him. "She just made up a bunch of stuff," Mulich says of Garcia.

When the Pitch spoke to Howard and pressed him for details of his interview with Garcia, he acknowledged that Garcia had never said she actually saw Rajanna eat a fetus. She told Howard that she had seen him eat something from a container that resembled the ones she'd seen him store fetuses in and concluded that he'd eaten fetal tissue.

"She leaned over and whispered to one of the other girls, and they both concurred that's what it was," Howard says.

At first, Rajanna denied repeated requests for an interview. His attorney, Robert Manske, complained that it was unfair for Rajanna to have to prove he didn't do something.

Finally, Rajanna granted a telephone interview. Sounding emotionally shaken by the controversy, he explained that there was a very simple reason why he never ate fetal tissue.

He's a vegetarian.

"I was raised very strictly," Rajanna tells the Pitch. "My mother would commit suicide before she'd even think of touching a meat product." Though he says he has become more lax with his diet since he moved from southern India to the United States in the 1970s, meat still makes him squeamish. And he says he'd never consume a fetus. "This is outrageous," Rajanna says.

Telling a police officer that Rajanna ate fetuses, the doctor says, was Garcia's way of getting revenge on him for reporting that he suspected his employees of theft and for firing her.

Rajanna says the police came to investigate the missing $1,000 but immediately sided with the employees. Rajanna admits he kept aborted fetuses in Styrofoam containers in his refrigerator's freezer, but he says he did it to keep them from rotting before they could be picked up by his biohazard disposal service. He adds that the vegetables and rice he eats from plastic containers, which he brings from home, are nothing like the Styrofoam containers in the freezer. "My food is in my own plastic containers. I make it at home and take it there," Rajanna says.