Topeka ? With abortion opponents lobbying legislators to intervene, Attorney General Paul Morrison said Tuesday that he’ll decide within a few weeks whether to file criminal charges against the state’s best-known abortion provider.

Two anti-abortion groups, Kansans for Life and Operation Rescue, are backing a House resolution to force Morrison to reinstate 30 misdemeanor criminal charges against Dr. George Tiller, one of the few U.S. doctors to perform late-term abortions.

Those charges were filed in December in Sedgwick County by Morrison’s predecessor, Phill Kline, accusing Tiller of violating restrictions on late-term abortions, but were dismissed. Morrison has said repeatedly he’s conducting his own investigation.

“I know that we’re getting close to the end,” Morrison said during a news conference. “I’d say weeks – it shouldn’t be months.”

He added: “We’re not going to drag our feet just to drag our feet.”

Abortion opponents don’t believe Morrison will be aggressive in prosecuting Tiller, because the doctor helped finance hundreds of thousands of dollars of anti-Kline advertising in the 2002 and 2006 elections.

Morrison, an abortion rights Democrat, unseated Kline, an anti-abortion Republican, in the November general election, but Kline’s term didn’t end until Jan. 8. A day after Kline filed the charges against Tiller, a district judge dismissed them on jurisdictional grounds.

Mary Kay Culp, Kansans for Life’s executive director, took no comfort in Morrison’s promise, saying, “We don’t have any real reason to trust him to do a good job.”

Culp’s group and Operation Rescue sponsored a Statehouse rally Tuesday, attended by about 100 people, many of them wearing red T-shirts that said, “Charge Tiller. It’s the Law.”

The House Federal and State Affairs Committee already has adopted a resolution telling Morrison to prosecute Tiller, but it also scheduled a hearing Tuesday on Tiller’s case. That hearing was brief, though, with the committee’s chairman reading a letter from Morrison, who did not attend.

Ashley Anstaett, the attorney general’s spokeswoman, told reporters before the hearing that Morrison had scheduling conflicts. But at his news conference, Morrison said: “Actually, the main reason was, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about an ongoing criminal investigation in a public forum. These are really sensitive matters.”

Besides trying to force Morrison to refile the case against Tiller, abortion opponents want the House, a majority of whose members oppose abortion, to conduct its own investigation.

“If they would take it a step further, if they would do investigatory hearings, if they would assign a special prosecutor, that would be even better,” Culp said.

Tiller’s attorneys have said repeatedly that the charges were without merit. Lee Thompson, an attorney representing Tiller, called Kansans for Life and Operation Rescue “extremist groups without credibility.”

“The voice of the people was heard loud and strong when Phill Kline was defeated,” Thompson said, noting the Morrison received 59 percent of the vote.

Morrison said politics are involved in legislators’ interest in forcing his hand, but added, “Do I attach bad motives to it? No.

“I think they’re passionate about that issue and they want to see some action,” he said. “But what I’m saying is, they don’t know the facts and they don’t know the evidence. They’re relying on what they’ve been told.”

Kline’s legislative allies engineered the House committee’s endorsement of the resolution Monday, sending it to the House. The resolution invokes a little-used Kansas law that allows either the House or the Senate to adopt a resolution to force the attorney general to file a case.

Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, has said he doesn’t know how quickly the House will debate the measure.

“We must send this to a jury of Mr. Tiller’s peers to decide whether or not he’s guilty and remove the cloud of suspicion that hangs over Kansas today,” Troy Newman, Operation Rescue’s president said, shouting over abortion opponents’ applause at the news conference. “Kansas is the laughingstock of America. Do laws mean anything?”

In his complaint against Tiller, Kline alleged the doctor performed 15 illegal late-term abortions in 2003 on patients aged 10 to 22, then failed to properly report the details to state health officials.