The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday issued opinions striking down two laws that limit access to abortion, with the court again concluding that the state constitution protects the right to personal autonomy, which includes a woman’s decisions about her own health, body and family planning.
One of the cases, filed in 2015, had already been judged by the higher court. The law in question effectively banned the most common form of abortion, dilation and evacuation in the second trimester, except when necessary to save the mother’s life.
The Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state constitution protects personal autonomy, including when it comes to the decision to continue a pregnancy, and that any government violation of this right must be able to “withstand strict scrutiny.”
The case was sent to a district court, which concluded that there was “no reasonable alternative” to dilation and evacuation and that the Kansas state government had failed to prove that the law was constitutional, permanently barring its enforcement. The state Supreme Court upheld that decision this week.
“The State has devoted much of its mandate to calling on us to reverse our previous ruling in this case that the Kansas Constitution protects the right to abortion. We declined the invitation,” Judge Eric S. Rosen wrote in the opinion.
Ruling on another case, first filed in 2011, the Kansas Supreme Court also upheld a lower court’s ruling that found that licensing requirements for abortion providers infringed on women’s right to bodily autonomy and did not survive rigorous scrutiny.
The Kansas state legislature passed legislation in 2011 imposing new regulations on facilities that provide abortion care, including “any clinic, hospital, or ambulatory surgical center, in which any elective abortion in the second or third trimester, or five or more elective abortions in the first trimester are performed within a month, excluding any abortion performed due to a medical emergency.”
Among the requirements was the need for a doctor to be present in the room when a medication to induce an abortion was administered to a patient.
The state argued that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit lacked standing and also that the district court erred in its ruling. But the state high court agreed that the law was unconstitutional and concluded that there was standing since the plaintiffs, a women’s health clinic, proved that it faced “an actual or threatened injury” due to the law.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
