Thanks to this decision, if you make a birth control mistake (which we all do at some point or another) and become pregnant before you’re ready or willing to be a mother, you can just go to a nearby clinic and get an abortion. When policymakers place severe restrictions on Medicaid coverage of abortion, research shows, it forces one in four poor women seeking an abortion to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. “We do not think this will sit well with the majority of Kansas and changes will come”, said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, in a statement. McCorvey wanted to abort her third child, but Texas state law only allowed it if a woman’s life was in danger.
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“I would have walked through broken glass to get this abortion, and there was no way I was not going to do it”, said Pamela Mason, who had an abortion in 1971 when she was 18 years old.
Roe v. Wade kept states from being able to explicitly make abortion illegal.
An appeals court in Kansas struck down the state’s ban on a common method of second-trimester abortion Friday, on the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Tie votes from the court uphold the lower-court ruling being appealed.
The Republican attorney general said in a statement that Friday’s ruling from the Kansas Court of Appeals provides little legal clarity. “This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy”, it wrote in the opinion.
“The ruling reveals that there is a huge disagreement even within the courts about abortion and its legal standing in Kansas”, stated Cheryl Sullenger, Senior Vice President of Operation Rescue. Texas claims the law protects women’s health, which is constitutionally allowable, but some of the lawmakers who support it have said they just want to make abortions harder to access, which is not permitted under the Constitution.
The law prohibits doctors from using forceps or similar instruments on a live fetus to remove it from the womb in pieces. It outlaws dilation and evacuation (D and E) procedures, the most commonly used second-trimester abortion method.
A state court blocked SB 95 before it could take effect. The court split down the middle, with seven judges voting to uphold a lower court ruling temporarily blocking implementation of the Kansas ban and seven voting to reverse the lower court.
The Court of Appeals heard the case en banc, meaning that all 14 judges on the court participated in deciding the appeal.
The event is held on January 22 every year, the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court which established the constitutional right to an abortion. In fact, more than one-quarter of the state abortion restrictions enacted since Roe v. Wade were imposed between 2011 and 2015.
Abortion rights supporters said the law needs to be overturned, because it prevents doctors from using their medical judgment. Stunningly, Republicans in the House of Representatives have voted 11 times in the current Congress to limit women’s access to health care, including contraception. Section 2 provides, “All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and are instituted for their equal protection and benefit …” “Neither the attorneys nor the justices had any factual record on which to rely to ask or answer basic questions, like the number of abortions, the medical implications, the risks, the legal history [or] the objective of abortion laws”. There’s also the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case of 1992 that allowed the state to regulate abortions, thus limiting where and when women can have them.
Hodes and Nauser were represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights based in NY.
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The case has involved all of the appeals court’s judges, rather than the normal three-judge panel, which judicial branch officials believe hasn’t happened since 1989.
