Six weeks ago, Kansans for Life characterized the Planned Parenthood lawsuit against the newly-passed Pro-Life Protections Act as “a desperate move to appease its base in the wake of increased pro-life laws that reflect the will of the people but jeopardize the bottom line of abortion businesses.”
Developments in the court of Federal Judge Kathryn Vratil show that KFL was right–the filing was not justified, just grandstanding and Planned Parenthood is now withdrawing two-thirds of its lawsuit’s complaints!
In a 20-minute phone conference Monday afternoon with Judge Vratil, attorneys for Comprehensive Health/Planned Parenthood of Overland Park confirmed that they are amending their original filing to:
- withdraw opposition to the statement “abortion terminates the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”;
- withdraw opposition to the information about the pain-capability of the unborn child; but
- retain opposition to a requirement that each clinic’s online home page feature a hyperlink to the state’s informed consent website.
Planned Parenthood’s “backpedaling” amendments will be filed formally on Wednesday and the state of Kansas defense attorneys plan to accept them. A hearing before Judge Vratil on the hyperlink issue will happen later this fall.
In the meantime, the entire Pro-Life Protections Act has gone into effect except the hyperlink mandate and one medical emergency definition, both of which were temporarily enjoined by Shawnee County District Judge Rebecca Crotty. Judge Vratil has acknowledged that Judge Crotty’s injunction is in effect– the result of a separate lawsuit filed in state court by the Overland Park Center for Women’s Health (owned by abortionists Herb Hodes and Traci Nauser).
During the two years of hearings for the Pro-Life Protections Act, abortion supporters maligned it as ‘sweeping’, ‘extremist’, ‘a mandate that abortionists lie to women’, and ‘support for obstetricians to trick women into birthing disabled children’. They wailed about provisions of the Act that removed tax-funding for abortion training, ended tax benefits for abortionists and restricted abortionists from teaching classroom sex-ed. They huffed and puffed about language the U.S. Supreme Court approved in 1989 that human life begins at fertilization.
Yet now we see that their ONLY legal complaint (other than a hyper-technical misinterpretation of one of the medical emergency definitions) is that they must acknowledge the scientific accuracy of the state health department’s informed consent website –a website to which abortion clinics have voluntarily linked for years!
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
Abortion businesses are a commercial enterprise subject to government regulation. It is an extremely weak argument they put forth (in both federal and state court) that their “free speech” rights are being violated when required to label the state information in the hyperlink as medically accurate.
We expect Kansas to win both the federal and state lawsuits, but it’s a shame that tax payers have to pay to defend good, protective legislation from abortion business nuisance suits.
LifeNews.com Note: Kathy Ostrowski is the legislative director for Kansans for Life, a statewide pro-life group.
