Abortion providers sued Kansas on Tuesday over a law enacted this year and existing restrictions, including a decades-old requirement that patients wait 24 hours after first seeing a provider to terminate their pregnancies.
Besides the waiting period, the lawsuit challenges a law set to take effect July 1 that will require providers to tell patients that a medication abortion can be stopped using a regimen that major medical groups have called unproven and potentially dangerous.
The lawsuit, filed in state district court in Johnson County in the Kansas City area, argues that Kansas has created a “Biased Counseling Scheme” designed to discourage patients from getting abortions and to stigmatize patients who terminate their pregnancies. The lawsuit contends that the requirements have become “increasingly absurd and invasive” over time and spread medical misinformation.
Kansas voters in August 2022 decisively affirmed abortion rights, refusing to overturn a state Supreme Court decision three years earlier that declared access to abortion a matter of bodily autonomy and a fundamental right under the state constitution. The providers hope the state courts will invalidate the entire state law that spells out what they must tell patients — in writing — and when, with a single, specific style of type mandated for the forms.
“We thought about the fact that the voters were very clear in the fact that they want providers able to speak directly and honestly to their patients,” said Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, one of the providers filing the lawsuit.
Wales added that the newest restriction caused the providers to look at the state’s requirements more broadly: “This addition would really harm patients potentially, so we felt compelled to do something.”
The medication abortion-reversal regimen, touted for more than a decade by abortion opponents, uses doses of a hormone, progesterone, commonly used in attempts to prevent miscarriages. Supporters of the new law — and Kansas’ entire Right to Know Act — argue that they are making sure that patients have the information they need to make informed decisions about ending their pregnancies.
