On Friday, the Kansas Supreme Court overturned a ban on abortions in the second trimester that was backed by Republicans. The court also said that the state’s constitution protects access to abortion, though one judge did not agree.
“The Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights protects a fundamental right to personal autonomy,” the court said in two different decisions released on Friday. “This includes a pregnant person’s right to terminate a pregnancy.” The Court also decided against several state laws that said abortion providers had to get licenses.
A law passed in 2015, backed by Republicans, made it illegal to perform the common second-trimester abortion technique known as dilation and evacuation. However, the decisions stopped the law from going into effect. The Court decided that S.B. 95, also known as the Unborn Protection from Dismemberment Act, goes against the Bill of Rights in the Kansas Constitution and “hurts the right to have an abortion.”
Newsweek sent an email to the Kansas Republican Party on Friday afternoon asking for a statement. Newsweek sent Mike Brown, the chair of the Party, a text message on Friday afternoon.
Kansas has been a very conservative state for many years, but in the last few years, it has become the center of national arguments about abortion. Kansans overwhelmingly turned down an amendment in August 2022 that would have taken away protections for abortion from the state constitution. This was just a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs ruling, which ended the federal right to abortion. It was the first vote of its kind in the country since Dobbs. In their view, most people talked about the vote in 2022 and said, “The people spoke with their votes.”
The results have been praised by people who support abortion care, like the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which brought one of the cases on behalf of an abortion care provider. The president and CEO of CRR, Nancy Northup, called the decision a “immense victory for the health, safety, and dignity of people in Kansas and the entire Midwestern region, where millions have been cut off from abortion access.”
“The number of abortions provided in Kansas increased by 57% in 2022, with over two-thirds of patients traveling from out of state,” the statement said, citing data from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. This is part of a larger trend of people from states with stricter abortion rules coming to Kansas to get medical care.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, there have been a lot more abortions in Kansas. This is mostly because of patients from other states, probably from Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas, which have stricter abortion laws.
A group that supports abortion rights, the Guttmacher Institute, put out a study last month saying that the number of abortion clinics in Kansas will grow by 50% between 2020 and 2023.