NC abortion protester convicted of stalking doctor (AP)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – A jury found a North Carolina preacher guilty of stalking a Charlotte abortion doctor after passing out hundreds of "wanted" posters with the physician's name and photo on it.

Jurors deliberated about 90 minutes Friday before finding Rev. Phillip "Flip" Benham, director of Concord-based Operation Save America, guilty of misdemeanor stalking, The Charlotte Observer reported.

Benham, 62, was sentenced to 18 months of probation and ordered to stop any intimidating behaviors.

"I can't speak. I can't get within 500 feet," Benham said outside court, holding his Bible. "They've stolen from innocent babies a voice that has spoken for them."

Prosecutors said Benham distributed photos with the names and photos of several Charlotte doctors who perform abortions and the words "Wanted ... By Christ, to Stop Killing Babies."

Benham knew that doctors in other places had been killed after similar posters were made, Assistant District Attorney Kristen Northrup said.

"What would a reasonable person think if they saw `Wanted' on a poster with their picture on it?" Northrup said.

The doctor, who wasn't named by the newspaper, was so afraid that anti-abortion activists might attack him that he has tinted his car windows, drives several different routes to work and doesn't park in his designated space at the three clinics where he works, Northrup said.

Benham's attorney filed a notice to appeal immediately after the verdict, saying his client shouldn't be associated with activists who have turned to violence.

"This case is not about the flashpoint of abortion, it's about what Mr. Benham did or did not do," Toussaint Romain said.

Benham had never even met the doctor in person until they saw each other in court, Romain said.

Benham said he will respect the verdict, but won't stop protesting at other abortion clinics. And he expects the protests outside the doctor's clinics to continue too.

"There will be other people who will come and stand up for what's right," Benham said.

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Information from: The Charlotte Observer, http://www.charlotteobserver.com

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Court Blocks Kansas Law Shutting Down Abortion Clinics (Time.com)

By KAREN BALL / KANSAS CITY, KAN. Karen Ball / Kansas City, Kan. – Sat Jul 2, 1:30 am ET

Kansas' efforts to shut down two abortion providers will have to wait as a federal judge temporarily blocked the state Friday from imposing tough new licensing restrictions.

U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia, reading from the bench, issued a preliminary injunction, saying providers and women would suffer "irreparable" injury if the regulations took effect Friday as scheduled. The injunction will hold until a trial determines the legality over rules that, among other things, mandate the size of janitors' closets and require lockers for patients.

"This is a tremendous victory," said Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented a father-daughter team from Overland Park, Kan. who had been denied a license. (See TIME's special report on women's health.)

"The facts were clear," said Northup, "this licensing process had absolutely nothing to do with patient health or safety and everything to do with political shenanigans."

One other clinic, Aid for Women in Kansas City Kan., will also be able to reopen its doors. Planned Parenthood, after purchasing a "neo-natal crash unit" that it said was unnecessary, was able to meet the licensing requirements at the last-minute on Thursday. If not for the judge's Friday order, that clinic would have been the only provider left in the state.

Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, says it was never the law's intent to shut down abortion clinics and notes that although South Carolina has a similar law, clinics there have survived. Abortion providers are "putting on a show," she says. "They're the ones who said if you make abortion legal, we'll keep women safe," she says. "Why wouldn't you want rooms big enough to get gurneys in and out of?"

But supporters of abortion rights said the Kansas law was part of a coordinated national campaign to chip away at a woman's right to reproductive freedom. "More like hack away," said Northup.

"Since the November elections," added Tait Sye of the national Planned Parenthood office in New York, "we've gone through the greatest legislative assault on women's health in a generation."

If the new regulations in Kansas are ultimately upheld, Planned Parenthood said its services will be strained. About 8,000 women a year seek abortions in Kansas; Planned Parenthood performed about 5,000 of them last year, the other two providers handling 3,000. That likely includes a large number of patients from across the state line, where Missouri already has tough restrictions in place and there are no clinics in the urban core of Kansas City. (See why Kansas tried to shut down abortion clinics.)

Dr. Herbert Hodes, who filed suit with his daughter, says abortion is just one of the services he and his daughter provide in their private ob-gyn practice. He delivers babies at nearby hospitals and performs other procedures, like tubal ligations, in his office. He says there's no reason to mandate patient lockers - he notes that hospitals usually just put a patient's belongings in a bag under the gurney when they go from pre-op to surgery to recovery.

"It's a joke and a sham," Hodes told TIME. "The only purpose is to shut down access to abortions." He says he complies with rules from the Kansas Board of Healing Arts and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists since "they're realistic regulations drawn up by doctors for doctors. We all know how much legislators know about health care for women - nothing," Hodes says.

Kansas legislators have tried to implement similar regulations before but gained traction only with the election of the conservative Brownback. Kansas is also one of the states where lawmakers are trying to block funding for Planned Parenthood. The state has long been a hotbed for the abortion issue; it's where Dr. George Tiller, who famously offered late-term abortions in Wichita, was murdered in 2009.

Jeff Pederson of Aid for Women echoes Hodes' complaints about unnecessary regulations, saying that one of the new codes mandates a two-hour recovery period. He says that when he accompanied his father to get his teeth pulled, his dad was sedated, yet they left 10 minutes after the procedure was complete. "The women don't want to stay here two hours, and they don't need to. They have a caregiver with them. They're drunk, but they're walking."

The majority of Pederson's clients are low-income or minorities, he says, and he fears folks will go back to pre–Roe v. Wade days of seeking home remedies or other means to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. "I can remember what it was like before."

See why teen pregnancy and abortions are on the rise.

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Kan. abortion rules face test in federal court (AP)

TOPEKA, Kan. – Kansas still has one abortion provider, but two others that have had to halt services because they don't have state licenses hoped Friday to persuade a federal judge to block a new licensing law and health department regulations they consider burdensome.

The state attorney general's office argued before a Friday hearing in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., that a license granted to a Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri clinic disproves critics' contention that the new Kansas rules are designed to cut off access to abortion.

The licensing law was part of a wave of anti-abortion legislation enacted across the nation this year, but had none of its three providers received a license, Kansas would have been the only state in the nation without a clinic or doctor's office performing abortions.

Its regulations tell providers what drugs and equipment they must stock, set acceptable temperatures for procedure and recovery rooms and set minimum sizes for some rooms. Supporters believe those rules will protect patients. But abortion-rights advocates have called the licensing process a "sham" because Gov. Sam Brownback is an anti-abortion Republican, and abortion foes pushed the law through the GOP-controlled Legislature.

Planned Parenthood received a license Thursday from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, after initially being denied but having inspectors visit its clinic in Overland Park a second time. The new licensing law and the accompanying regulations took effect Friday.

The lawsuit before U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia was filed earlier this week by Drs. Herbert Hodes and Traci Nauser, who provide abortions and other services at the Center for Women's Health, also in Overland Park. The state's other provider, Aid for Women Clinic in Kansas City, has been allowed to intervene.

The attorney general's office attached the Planned Parenthood license in a court document filed Thursday evening, shortly after the health department confirmed it had granted a license to one of the state's providers and Planned Parenthood identified itself as the recipient.

"Women in Kansas seeking abortion services will still be able to obtain medical care at a properly licensed facility even if the statute and regulations are enforced exactly as written," the attorney general's office said.

But Bonnie Scott Jones, an attorney for the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights, which is representing Hodes and Nauser, said the state still has a "crazy process" that involved abortion opponents rushing unreasonable regulations into place.

As for Planned Parenthood's license, she said, "That's certainly better than no one being open, but it's certainly not enough to meet the needs of the women of Kansas."

She also noted that the Planned Parenthood clinic already was regulated by the health department as one of the state's 74 ambulatory surgical centers. Those centers face more detailed rules than dozens of clinics and doctor's offices performing surgical procedures, which are covered by rules from the State Board of Healing Arts, which licenses physicians.

Both Aid for Women and the Center for Women's Health fall under the office-based surgery rules, and their doctors argue that those standards are strong enough to protect patients. Those rules don't set minimum sizes for rooms, for example.

Besides objecting to the content, the providers argue that the state violated their right to due legal process by imposing the rules so quickly. The department argues the licensing law mandated a fast track.

Brownback signed the licensing law in mid-May; the providers received the current version of the regulations less than two weeks before they took effect. A state board approved the rules Thursday, allowing them to take effect.

The department hasn't taken public comments on the regulations though it has scheduled a Sept. 7 hearing in Topeka and plans to consider suggested changes.

Among other things, the Kansas regulations for abortion providers require rooms where abortions are performed to have at least 150 sq. feet of space, excluding fixed cabinets, and to keep their temperatures between 68 and 73 degrees. Each procedure room also must have its own janitor's closet with at least 50 sq. feet. Also, any patient must remain in a recovery room for at least two hours.

Aid for Women was denied a license without an inspection after it disclosed in its application that the clinic required extensive renovations to comply with the new rules.

The Center for Women's Health cancelled its inspection after Hodes and Nauser filed their lawsuit. In that document, they acknowledged that none of its six procedure rooms were big enough to comply with the regulations, nor did they have enough janitorial closet space.

Planned Parenthood said it had been denied a license Monday, and it was certain enough that it wouldn't get one by Friday that it filed its own lawsuit Thursday in federal court, also in Kansas City. The lawsuit said the Planned Parenthood clinic met most requirements and could comply with others.

Court documents also disclosed that the clinic was still in contact with the health department, trying to show that it would comply with all regulations. The license granted to Planned Parenthood is good for a year, the term specified by law.

President and CEO Peter Brownlie said he expects the Planned Parenthood chapter to withdraw its lawsuit and work to change the regulations.

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Online:

Kansas Department of Health and Environment: http://www.kdheks.gov/

Center for Reproductive Rights: http://reproductiverights.org/

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