Shawnee County District Court Judge Larry Hendricks
A state district court this morning in Topeka issued an injunction that bars the first-in-nation Kansas Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act [Senate Bill 95] from going into effect July 1.
Judge Larry Hendricks granted the block, which was filed and argued by the national Center for Reproductive Rights, on behalf of the Overland Park Center for Women’s Health –that has sued two other Kansas pro-life laws, still in litigation.
The Kansas Attorney General’s office had defended SB 95 as well-founded on U.S. Supreme Court language that upholds the states’ right to show respect for life inside the mother and to insure the integrity of the medical profession which it regulates.
As defined in SB 95, a dismemberment abortion is performed when sharp metal tools are used to grab and yank off limbs of a living, well-formed, unborn child inside the mother’s womb. Unfortunately, today’s hearing completely omitted the procedure’s description, and focused on dry legal points as if debating a parking lot boundary line.
Kansans for Life executive director, Mary Kay Culp, commented, “Kansans were outraged to learn of this barbaric method of shredding apart innocent unborn children and they will hold the judiciary responsible for rejecting the validity of this duly-passed law.”
In this morning’s hearing, Judge Hendricks totally echoed the abortion industry claim that the federal “right” to an abortion is fully upheld in the Kansas constitution. Hendricks ignores the key 2007 Gonzales ruling, in which the Court said:
“Casey does not allow a doctor to choose the abortion method he or she might prefer …[and physicians] are not entitled to ignore regulations that direct them to use reasonable alternative procedures.”
Even pro-abortion justices of the U. S. Supreme Court have acknowledged that the dismemberment of a living unborn child is as brutal and inhumane a method of abortion as the partial-birth abortion procedure, which is now illegal throughout the country.
SB 95 allowed exceptions for an abortion needed to prevent the death or physical damage to the mother. The federal Partial-birth abortion ban allows only an exception to prevent death of the mother. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that law in 2007.
Kansas health department statistics had shown a recent 9% rise in use of this inhuman dismemberment method, which was used to tear apart 637 living unborn children in 2014.
Kansans for Life believes that this law will eventually be upheld—mirroring the long, but successful partial-birth abortion battle in which the U.S. Supreme Court eventually acknowledged the validity of pro-life legislation.