Kansas lawmakers consider "born-alive" bill
Legislature exaggerates commonality of live births within reproductive care
The Kansas state legislature recently introduced a “born-alive” bill that was based on the claim that doctors leave infants to die. The law targets abortion providers.
Live births during abortions rarely if ever happen. Zachary Gingrich-Gaylord is a spokesman for Trust Women, a clinic based in Wichita. He said the bill was based on “fantasy rhetoric.
“It’s that's really just meant to stigmatize abortions,” Gingrich-Gaylord said. “But also to make doctors and clinic staff more unwilling to do this type of work in this region.”
Last year, Kansans voted down a proposed amendment to the state constitution that could have made abortion illegal. A lot of the things coming out of Kansas legislators’ offices are a result of posturing and grandstanding. Most of the bills will not make it out of session and won’t be seen as constitutional under court challenge.
“So this is really just legislators spending time on issues that their constituents have already said they do not want them to spend time on,” Gingrich-Gaylord said.
Kansans’ political sensibilities are complicated, as they are in many other parts of the country. But the defeat of last year’s amendment shows something about their views on abortion.
“What was clear was that at the point of the ballot box, what they felt was that the amendment was an unacceptable overreach of government power into something that should be really something that is family business,” Gingrich-Gaylord said.
The new bill and other efforts by the antiabortion movement have created a hostile environment for doctors who perform abortions. Along with the protests and harassment, these efforts to get laws that chill reproductive care are another major prong within the antiabortion plan to eliminate much-needed medical assistance.
“It's incredibly difficult to get local providers to work in abortion care, and that's directly due to the hostile environment that's created by legislation like this,” Gingrich-Gaylord said.