Kansas Supreme Court holds women have right to abortion

The Kansas Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the state’s constitution grants women a right to bodily autonomy, which includes a right to obtain an abortion. In that decision, it declared a 2015 Kansas law to be unconstitutional. The law had not been in effect due to prior legal proceedings. In another decision on Friday, the court further affirmed the state’s constitution granted women the right to abort their unborn babies.

What’s the story with these cases? The Kansas Legislature passed a law in 2015 that protected unborn babies from dismemberment in second-trimester abortions except to save the life of the mother. Some abortionists sued, saying the law violated the state’s constitution. The Kansas Supreme Court eventually heard that case in 2019. It upheld a temporary injunction against the law’s enforcement, ruling the state’s constitution did grant women the right to have an abortion. In its 2019 decision, the state high court remanded the case back to a lower court for further proceedings, saying the state government needed to prove the state had a compelling government interest to keep the law in place and that the law was narrowly tailored to meet that interest.

If it decided this in 2019, why was it ruling on it again on Friday? As the case worked its way back through the court system, the state argued that it had a compelling government interest in protecting unborn babies. When the case again went before the Kansas Supreme Court, the state invited the high court to overturn its prior ruling establishing a constitutional right to abortion in the state. The court declined to do so. Instead, it ruled that while the Kansas Legislature had a compelling government interest in protecting unborn babies, the 2015 law was not the proper way to achieve that interest.

What about the other case the court decided today? The second decision pertained to laws regulating abortion facilities’ operations. Abortionists at one Kansas facility sued, saying the laws violated the provisions of the state’s constitution granting women the right to obtain abortions. The Kansas Supreme Court found that those laws did not further a compelling governmental interest and were not narrowly tailored in a manner that would allow the government to limit that constitutional right.

Dig deeper: Listen to Leah Savas’ report on The World and Everything in It podcast about how churches in Kansas differ on the best way to protect unborn babies outside the womb.