Governor Brownback was eager to sign the latest anti-abortion bill endangering women's health.
Kansas this week was the first state to enact a new law curtailing abortion. But it certainly won't be the last. Forced birthers are at work to get the law on the books elsewhere, too. This latest law in a decades' long string of measures to curb abortion means bigger health risks for women. But, of course, women's health has never been a concern of these no-choice soldiers.
So bad is the latest statute that The New York Times editorial board felt compelled to weigh in:
On Tuesday the state went still further, becoming the first to ban the safest and by far the most common method of ending a second-trimester pregnancy, dilation and evacuation, which involves dilating the cervix and removing the fetus, often in parts. (On Wednesday, a similar bill passed the Oklahoma Legislature, and awaits the governor’s signature. Bills are also pending in Missouri and South Carolina.)
The anti-abortion activists in Kansas avoided actual medical terminology in drafting Senate Bill 95, which refers to the banned procedure as a “dismemberment abortion.” The law’s language aims for maximum shock value, describing “clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors” or other instruments that “slice, crush or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.”
As Teddy Wilson at RHReality
points out, the language is all part of the latest
strategy of the National Right to Life Committee. Just like its use of "partial-birth abortion."
Fact of the matter is, a D&E is the best method for terminating a pregnancy after 14 weeks. But like the long string of other abortion laws the forced-birthers have lobbied through legislature after legislature—more than 300 proposed nationwide so far in 2015 alone—safety and medical efficacy is not what they have in mind. It's all about controlling women and their sexuality. They make no bones about their goal of shutting down every abortion clinic in the country regardless of what Roe v. Wade says. That effort has had great success in reducing women's options in state after state, six of which now have only a single clinic remaining. Women's health and well-being? Pfffffft.
If further proof were needed, the debate over the Kansas law provides it. Rep. Barbara Bollier, a Republican, introduced an amendment that would let physicians use D&E prior to 24 weeks of gestation if a pregnant woman’s membrane ruptures, something that could expose her to serious infection:
“When the water breaks the clock starts ticking, because infection can set in,” Bollier said, reported the Topeka Capital-Journal. “A doctor’s goal is always to do what is safest. In this very, very tragic circumstance, the safest thing may be to do this procedure.”
The amendment was defeated. And the entire bill was then approved in the Kansas House mostly along party lines by a vote of 98-26. The state Senate had already passed it 31-9, with one Republican and all the Democrats voting against it. Gov. Sam Brownback then signed it. A similar law
passed final reading in the Oklahoma legislature Wednesday and awaits the governor's signature.