During the past four years, the state of Kansas has become ground zero in the war to criminalize all abortions, and in the process to remove a woman’s ability to control what happens in her own body.

Under Gov. Sam Brownback, a staunch foe of a woman’s right to choose, Kansas’ increasingly hard-line conservative lawmakers have enacted more than two dozen restrictions curtailing women’s reproductive freedom. These include, among many others, banning all abortions after 20 weeks, restricting health insurance plans from covering the procedure, defining life as beginning at fertilization, and forcing women to undergo ultrasounds, as well as to sit through medically inaccurate lectures, before ending a pregnancy.

On Tuesday the state went still further, becoming the first to ban the safest and by far the most common method of ending a second-trimester pregnancy, dilation and evacuation, which involves dilating the cervix and removing the fetus, often in parts. (On Wednesday, a similar bill passed the Oklahoma Legislature, and awaits the governor’s signature. Bills are also pending in Missouri and South Carolina.)

The anti-abortion activists in Kansas avoided actual medical terminology in drafting Senate Bill 95, which refers to the banned procedure as a “dismemberment abortion.” The law’s language aims for maximum shock value, describing “clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors” or other instruments that “slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.”