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"Am I paranoid?" she asks. "No, I'm not. I just know too much to have real faith in it working equitably, because it doesn't — it's not an equitable system."
If the board takes her license, Neuhaus will likely appeal. While she waits, she may go on welfare.
"Eventually I'll be living out in the Occupy Kansas City in the park," she says. "Or maybe I'll go to D.C."
"Tristan and I won't be doing that," Caddell says with a chuckle. He's standing in the kitchen doorway, smoking a cigarette. He looks like a lost Mario brother with his handlebar mustache, horseshoe of long curly hair and denim overalls. He's a stay-at-home dad, taking care of Tristan, who has Type 1 diabetes and receives about a half-dozen insulin shots a day.
If the board allows her to keep her license, Neuhaus says she'll go back to providing low-income health care, as she has done since 1986, but not abortions.
"I'm done with this whole women's-right issue," she says. "It's definitely an underserved population, but I'm done. Not even in the wildest imaginable situation would I do it again. I would even sign a statement that I wouldn't do it again. I'm certainly not going to be working for Dr. Tiller again, am I? And we're not going to have a clinic like that ever again."
The case against Neuhaus started with Phill Kline, former Kansas attorney general and Johnson County district attorney. The fallout from his investigation is still being felt on both sides of the abortion debate. While the Kansas Board of Healing Arts decides whether Neuhaus can practice medicine again, a Kansas disciplinary panel is recommending that the Sunflower State's Supreme Court indefinitely suspend Kline's law license for the "dishonest and selfish" way in which he investigated abortion clinics. Neuhaus' livelihood hangs in the balance, but Kline's doesn't. His law license has lapsed, and he moved to Virginia in 2009 to teach law at the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University.
Neuhaus remembers the night she was served with a subpoena. It was December 2006, and a blizzard was blowing in. When there was a knock at her door, around 7 p.m., she expected another uninvited visitor spouting religious overtures. But she says it was Kline's lead investigator, Tom Williams, with a subpoena, summoning her to testify in Kline's inquisition.
Neuhaus says she and her attorney met with Kansas Assistant Attorney General Stephen Maxwell, one of Kline's lead prosecutors. Williams was also in the room. Neuhaus talked with them for about seven hours, and at some point, Maxwell asked her to bring her records to a follow-up meeting. She says Maxwell assured her that he wouldn't keep the records.
"I've spent four years trying to get Tiller's, and I'm not going to try to get yours," she says Maxwell told her. "It just takes too long. You just bring them so you can refresh your memory.
"I took him at his word, and the next week I showed up with these charts," she says. "He immediately seized them and had them copied. I think he gave them back to me then."
Neuhaus wishes that she'd skipped the hearing.
"Maxwell lied to me," she says. "That's how he got the records. And that's how the charges were filed. And that's how the trial happened. And that's how Dr. Tiller got killed. That whole sequence of events was predicated on criminal behavior on the part of the [AG's] office. Perjury is criminal. A lawyer is not allowed to lie at any time. He said to me, 'I'm not going to take your records.' When I walk in the door, he says, 'I'm taking your records.' And what choice do I have? I can take my box and try to run. Or I can go to jail. And if I go to jail, they still have my records. They literally cornered me and they avoided due process, and nobody's done a fucking thing about it."
The complaint filed against Neuhaus with the Board of Healing Arts didn't come from one of the 11 patients. It came from Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue's "senior policy advisor."
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