A century from now, Kansas students will wonder how a state that was founded to keep the west free from slavery allowed itself to become the world capital of an even greater affront to life and liberty: late-term abortion.

And they will shake their heads in dismay when they read of the rise of governor who flouted the state's abortion laws and the fall of the attorney general, who tried to enforce them.

That governor is Democrat Kathleen Sebelius. At this moment, the media are ignoring the body count she left behind in Kansas in their rush to sing Sebelius' praises as President Obama's latest nominee to head Health and Human Services.

The body count is real. In the past two years alone, women have come from 48 states and many points beyond to have abortions in Kansas.

They come not because Kansas has uniquely liberal abortion laws. They come because the state's governor has been uniquely indifferent to the law's enforcement.

The state's most efficient practitioner of this dubious art, Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, has boasted on his website of having "more experience in late abortion services with fetuses over 24 weeks than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, more than 60,000 since 1973."

What Tiller's website does not say is that during the six years of Sebelius' reign as governor, he has ended the lives of thousands of healthy babies ready to be born to mothers as healthy as they are in full violation of state law.

Nor does the website tell how Kathleen Sebelius personally intervened to let the carnage continue. This was no small task. To succeed, she had to destroy her attorney general, Phill Kline, who was hot on Tiller's trail.

As a state representative in 1997. Kline had helped draft legislation to check the state's then thriving late-term abortion business.

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The new law allowed for a late-term abortion on a viable baby only "to preserve the life of the pregnant woman" or to prevent her from suffering "substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function."

The new law and the reporting requirement should have put an end to the late-term business of Dr. Tiller and a handful of others, but by this time Tiller had learned to work the system.

His first step was to use his influence to finesse a mental health exception. But even the then attorney general, moderate Republican Carla Stovall, insisted that mental health problems had to be "permanent and substantial" to justify a late-term abortion.

Undaunted, Tiller made enough strategic donations to enough politicians to assure that no one enforced the law as written or even as interpreted.

In fact, the number of late-term abortions in Kansas on viable babies actually doubled in the three years after the restrictions were passed and began to decrease only after Kline announced for attorney general.

When Kline chose to run in 2002 for attorney general, the same year Sebelius first ran for governor, Tiller sensed trouble and responded accordingly.

Through a variety of PACs and cut-outs, he invested hundreds of thousands in Kline's obscure Democrat opponent and turned a would-be landslide into a nail biter.

A more opportunistic politician would have heeded the message from the state's "moderate" establishment and left the abortion industry alone, but Kline was not easily dissuaded.

Given that the numbers coming out of Tiller's clinic had increased since the tougher law had been written, Kline began to review the required reports to see just how Tiller had been able to circumvent the law.

Kline could see that not a single doctor in Kansas had checked the "prevent patient's death" box as a justification for the abortion. All checked the "impairment" box.

Tiller, Kline saw, offered no medical diagnosis for the impairment. He simply reiterated the wording of the law, namely "to avoid substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function."

Given the gravity of the procedure – that is the taking of a viable baby's life – Kline believed that some measure of respect for the legal process was due. There was only one way to assess the legitimacy of the work behind that process, and that was to subpoena the patient files.

In requesting these files, Kline began a descent into a hell that Sebelius helped keep on high broil, a hell that continues to intensify to this day.

Not content to drive Kline out of office and out of state, Sebelius and her cronies in the state judiciary are plotting Kline's bankruptcy and disbarment in the hopes of killing forever the story only Kline can tell.