A federal judge has ruled that sweaty little bastard Kansas AG Phil Kline, who sought to obtain the medical records of thousands of women and girls who sought abortions and justified it as an effort to enforce child-rape reporting laws, has no power here:
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — In a victory for an abortion rights group, a federal judge ruled Tuesday that abortion clinic doctors and other professionals are not required under Kansas law to report underage sex between consenting youths.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten was a setback for Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline, an abortion foe.
Kline contended a 1982 Kansas law requiring doctors, teachers and others to alert the state and law enforcement about potential child abuse covers consensual sex between minors. He argued that the law applies to abortion clinics, and later extended that to other health professionals and teachers.
The judge pointed out that the reporting law was meant to give health-care providers and other authority figures a tool for addressing child sexual abuse, not for regulating consensual sexual relationships between teenagers. Kline, of course, disagreed.
Marten ruled that a plain reading of the Kansas law gives health care providers discretion to determine whether there is reason to suspect a child has been injured as a result of sexual abuse.
The attorney general’s office had contended the law required mandatory reporting because sex is inherently harmful to underage children. In Kansas, the age of consent is 16.
Yes, yes, he’s just trying to protect the youth of his state, that’s all. He’s not obsessed with the sexual (and non-sexual) activities of minors, oh no. And he doesn’t have any kind of anti-choice, anti-sex agenda. So what if tracking births is an easier and cheaper way to determine whether underage sex occurred than subpoenaing the records of abortion clinics? The youth need to be protected from the scourge of promiscuity! And, by damn, if that means invading their medical privacy — as well as the medical privacy of every other patient at the clinic — then, by gum, Kline was willing to take on that challenge.
The judge, unfortunately for Kline, treated him as the panty-sniffer he really is.
“This case certainly is not about promoting sexual promiscuity among underage persons,” he wrote. “Each and every witness testified that underage sex should be discouraged. No witness suggested that sexual intercourse under the age of 12 should not be reported.”
The law “recognizes that sexual activity among underage persons occurs, and that any such activity that injures the minor will be reported,” the judge wrote.
And here’s another good aspect of the ruling: increased recognition that minors have a right to medical privacy.
Simon Heller, attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the ruling an important victory for young people.
“It is the first ruling recognizing the United States Constitution gives protection – constitutional protection – to the informational privacy rights of young people in health care,” Heller said.
Good for Judge Marten.
Via Atrios, from whom I stole the title of this post.