Topeka ? The state’s attorney general announced Thursday that he will file 19 misdemeanor charges against a high-profile abortion provider, after a six-month investigation into allegations that the doctor performed illegal late-term abortions.

Attorney General Paul Morrison said Dr. George Tiller, in obtaining a second opinion required under Kansas law for some late-term abortions, didn’t rely on a financially and legally independent doctor.

Morrison described the allegations as a “technical violation” of a 1998 law restricting late-term procedures. “And it’s my job to enforce the law,” he said in a written statement.

Morrison’s predecessor, Phill Kline, an anti-abortion Republican, had filed 30 misdemeanor charges against Tiller, who is one of the few U.S. physicians performing late-term abortions. The case, filed in December in Sedgwick County District Court, was dismissed by a judge over jurisdictional issues.

Morrison defeated Kline in last year’s general election and took office Jan. 8, launching his own review of the evidence Kline collected and gathering new information.

Morrison’s announcement Thursday was a surprise. A day earlier, his spokeswoman had confirmed that Morrison, an abortion-rights Democrat, would not pursue 15 reporting-related charges Kline had filed. Also, abortion opponents had said repeatedly that they didn’t think he would prosecute Tiller and had tried to build public pressure on Morrison to refile Kline’s case.

Morrison said Thursday that Kline’s charges were “incorrect and based on a political agenda” and insisted that his own case “was not about politics or pursuing a personal agenda.”

“During our review of Kline’s 30 mistaken charges, we found a pattern – a pattern of referrals from one physician,” he said.

The abortions in question involved cases in which patients were more than 21 weeks pregnant and the fetuses were able to survive outside the womb. Under such circumstances, Kansas law requires two doctors to conclude that if the pregnancy continues, a mother-to-be will face death or “substantial and irreversible” harm to “a major bodily function,” which has been interpreted to include mental health.

According to Morrison, Tiller listed the second doctor as Ann Kristin Neuhaus, who was included on Kline’s list of potential witnesses in his criminal case.