May 9, 2012

KANSAS IS poised to enact what could be the most restrictive abortion law in the country after the state House of Representatives voted 88-31 on May 7 to approve a bill that would institute a long list of obstacles to women's access to abortion.

According to anti-abortion Republican Rep. John Rubin, "The specific goal of this bill is to ensure that no taxpayer funds are used, either directly or indirectly, to fund abortions, abortion providers or abortion training." But the legislation does a lot more than that.

The 69-page bill, which now goes to the state Senate for approval, includes provisions that would prohibit tax deductions for insurance covering abortion and abortion services, and that would bar state employees, including doctors-in-training at the University of Kansas Medical Center, from performing abortions on state property or during the workday.

This would radically limit the availability of the training that doctors need to learn the procedures, thus limiting the number of doctors in the state who will be able to perform them.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback

"We should not pay residents to kill babies," the bill's author, Rep. Lance Kinzer, raved during a heated debate on the House floor. "No taxpayer dollars to pay residents to kill babies. This is training for elective abortion. It is frankly disgusting for me to allow that to go on for another year."

The proposed legislation, House Substitute for Senate Bill 313, includes restrictions to limit late-term abortions and a personhood provision, similar to the one that recently failed in Oklahoma, which defines a human being as, "an individual living member of the species of homo sapiens, including the unborn human being during the entire embryonic and fetal ages [sic] from fertilization to full gestation."

Perhaps the most disgraceful aspects of the bill are a sales tax for abortions and a provision that allows doctors to withhold medical information to a patient if it prevents an abortion, without fear of a malpractice suit. The legislation would also require a woman to hear the fetal heartbeat before she obtains an abortion.

The bill even requires doctors to inform patients of the supposed link between abortions and breast cancer--a bizarre myth that, according to the National Cancer Institute, has no scientific facts to support it.

While the bill stands a good chance of passing in the Republican-controlled state Senate, and anti-abortion Gov. Sam Brownback has said that he will sign it, pro-choice organizations in Kansas don't need to look much further than their southern neighbors in Oklahoma for a strategy for defeating the bill.

Anti-abortion personhood measures in that state inspired outraged pro-choice Oklahomans, and they organized one of the largest demonstrations for women's rights in the state's history. A personhood bill expected to fly through the state legislature didn't even make it to a vote in late April, and last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court voted unanimously against a proposed personhood ballot measure that it ruled was "clearly unconstitutional" because it blocked a woman's legal right to obtain an abortion.

Kansas needs a visible pro-choice, pro-woman movement to show the anti-choice right that women are infinitely better at making their own health decisions than the legislature.