TOPEKA, Kansas (LifeSiteNews) — The Kansas Supreme Court voted 5-1 on July 5 to strike down a pair of pro-life laws that banned gruesome “dismemberment” abortion procedures and imposed safety regulations on abortion facilities, citing language in the Kansas Constitution that state pro-lifers tried unsuccessfully to clarify in 2022.
Catholic News Agency reports that the first ruling concerned a 2015 ban on dilation & evacuation (D&E) abortion procedures, commonly used in the second trimester and more commonly known as “dismemberment abortions” because they function by tearing a preborn baby apart limb by limb. The second concerned a 2011 set of safety and licensing rules for abortion facilities that engaged in either any abortions past the first trimester or more than four first-trimester abortions per month.
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The justices, the majority of whom are Democrat appointees, ruled that the laws interfered with women’s “right” of “bodily integrity” under the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights. An April 2019 precedent by the Kansas Supreme Court asserted that the constitution’s guarantee of “equal and inalienable natural rights” encompasses a “woman’s right” to murder her unborn child in abortion.
“The state is prohibited from restricting that right [sic] unless it can show it is doing so to further a compelling government interest,” the justices declared on Friday. The lone dissenter, Justice Caleb Stegall, said the majority’s decision “fundamentally alters the structure of our government to magnify the power of the state” and “paints the interest in unborn life championed by millions of Kansans as rooted in an ugly prejudice.”
“Adding insult to injury, extremely liberal judges of the Kansas Supreme Court have now overturned basic health and safety standards for abortion facilities when one of the state’s largest abortion franchises recently operated for an unknown period of time with no medical oversight,” responded Kansans for Life communications director Danielle Underwood.
The ruling vindicates the case Kansas pro-lifers made two years ago for a proposed constitutional amendment clarifying that the “constitution of the state of Kansas does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion,” and that “the people, through their elected state representatives and state senators, may pass laws regarding abortion.” That amendment ultimately failed at the ballot box 59 percent to 41 percent, in a defeat pro-lifers attributed in large part to disinformation about what it would actually do.
“It hurts to say ‘We told you so’ to the many Kansans who were misled by the abortion industry’s assurances that it would still be ‘heavily regulated’ in our state if voters rejected the 2022 amendment,” said Underwood.
The rulings come at a time when national Republicans led by former President and 2024 nominee Donald Trump are moving away from the party’s past longstanding commitments to ending abortion nationwide in favor of relegating all future battles over its legality to individual states. The Kansas Supreme Court demonstrates how, without federal protections for the preborn, abortion-on-demand can be insulated from state legislative efforts through constitutional language and activist judges.
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Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.