By late afternoon Thursday, it looked as if Kansas would today become the only state in the country to have no abortion provider. Around 4:20 PM, however, state health officials informed Planned Parenthood of Overland Park that it had passed the rigorous inspection conducted under new licensing regulations specifically designed by anti-choice crusaders to shut down abortion clinics.
Two other clinics were earlier refused licenses and have filed their own lawsuits.
Bonnie Scott Jones, an attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights [said]: “That’s certainly better than no one being open, but it’s certainly not enough to meet the needs of the women of Kansas.”
Planned Parenthood filed suit Thursday in the expectation that it would not be licensed, a move a state anti-abortion leader had the nerve to call "theatrics."
Representatives of the other two clinics, Aid for Women and the Center for Women’s Health, will appear in U.S. District Court this afternoon. A brief for one of the lawsuits contends the licensing rules, which were enacted in May, impose a “number of ambiguous and unclear requirements” on the clinics. “As a whole, the temporary regulations impose burdensome and costly requirements that are not medically necessary or appropriate and that are not imposed on Kansas medical providers performing other comparable procedures.”
The new licensing law requires clinics to be inspected twice a year, including one unannounced review. It also spells out standards for operations, supplies, facilities and medical procedures.
The regulations total 36 pages. Among other things, they require any physician performing an abortion to have clinical privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic. They also require each facility to have drugs and equipment to deal with a medical crisis such as a heart attack or an allergic reaction to medication.
While some of the regulations seem reasonable, it's hard to justify others on any grounds but pure harassment. Facilities offering outpatient surgery other than abortion are not governed by similar rules. Not for nothing are these called TRAP laws, that is, "targeted regulation of abortion providers." Just another weapon with which anti-choice crusaders seek to make legal abortions ever more difficult to obtain. Nationwide, with hundreds of new laws introduced since January and more than 85 so far enacted, the crusaders have had a very successful year.
They didn't manage to get everything they wanted in Kansas. But it was a close call. And nobody who has followed the long-running Kansas abortion fight thinks this will be the last round.
Earlier this week, Peter Brownlie, president of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, said that after 20 hours of inspection over two days, he was sure the clinic had met all the requirements included in the regulations. But he hinted that he would not be surprised if no licenses were given. The regulations weren't finalized until June 17, giving the clinics little time to correct any deficiencies found by inspectors, who did not complete their work until late last week.
A week ago, Brownlie told Rebekah Dryden at the Rachel Maddow blog:
"It’s sort of absurd that Republican leadership in Kansas and that Governor [Sam] Brownback, who say—and I believe them—that they’re opposed to abortion for any reason, at any time, are taking action that will make it more difficult for people to avoid unplanned pregnancies which result in abortion. We've repeatedly called on the governor and the legislature to help prevent unintended pregnancies and the math is pretty simple and pretty clear. Half of all pregnancies in this country are unintended. Forty percent of those result in abortion. Yet what this state is doing is reducing access to family planning in pursuit of their political agenda."
The extremist anti-choice forces aren't about women's health, as the supporters of clinic licensing regulations like to pretend. They aren't just waging war on abortion clinics but on contraception itself through the "personhood redefinition movement" that would assign personhood rights to fertilized eggs. By attacking contraception, they are in fact ensuring that there will be more abortions. By making legal abortion harder to obtain, they guarantee that illegal ones will be sought. Like all extremists, they can't be reasoned with, or compromised with, or negotiated with. They must, instead, be confronted everywhere they pursue their anti-sex, anti-woman ideology. Reproductive rights are no luxury.