Kansans for Life today submitted an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief, supporting Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s position in the matter of the ground-breaking Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act.
The A.G. is appealing a lower court block on the law with a hearing scheduled Dec. 9 in front of the full, fourteen-member state Court of Appeals. The fact that this appeal is being expedited to the full court, instead of a 3-member panel, is extremely unusual and shows the high stakes involved.
The Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act was enacted in Kansas this April (followed within days by Oklahoma). The Act is model legislation developed by the National Right to Life Committee that is designed to pass U. S. Supreme Court scrutiny and would prohibit the brutal shredding of unborn children while still alive inside their mothers.
According to state reporting data, Kansas has seen a rise in such horrific abortions, from 584 in 2013 to 637 in 2014. All three abortion businesses in Kansas offer such procedures, with one admitting on national television they cost around $2,000.00 apiece.
THE TRUTH OF DISMEMBERMENT
Abortions by dismemberment are done mainly after the first trimester, when the unborn baby is too large to pass through the suction tubing of the abortion machine. In a dismemberment abortion, the abortionist continually reaches into the mother’s womb with a variety of sharp-edged metal clamps and tools, yanking off parts of the child and pulling them out onto a tray.
Infamous abortionist LeRoy Carhart (who still holds a medical license in Kansas) has described this procedure in court as “dismembering” and recounts how he uses ultrasound guidance so he knows that these unborn victims are still alive, with hearts beating, as the procedure unfolds.
Although pro-abortionists (and nearly every media outlet) refer to these abortions as D&E abortions, D&E is actually a broader term, encompassing the removal of baby body parts—whether parts are torn off of still-alive unborn children or taken off unborn children already dead through the intentional administration of a feticide or by the snipping of the umbilical cord. The Kansas and Oklahoma Acts only bar dismemberment abortions performed on a still-living unborn child.
Abortion attorneys are claiming that women’s health demands this barbaric procedure. This was also their claim when it came to partial-birth abortions, which the U. S. Supreme Court rejected in their 2007 Gonzales ruling. In that decision, the Court upheld that the federal ban on partial-birth abortions — forbidding an inhumane abortion procedure in order to show respect for the developing unborn child and to regulate medicine — was a proper exercise of legislatures.
The impetus for a ban on dismemberment abortion was the actual written comments by the Justices in the Gonzales decision, and in an earlier partial-birth ruling, Stenberg, that acknowledged the horrific abortion procedures.
Justice John Paul Stevens, an abortion supporter, in comparing partial-birth abortion to dismemberment abortion, said, “that the State furthers any legitimate interest by banning one but not the other, is simply irrational.” [Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914, 946-947]
Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, an abortion supporter, said both methods “could equally be characterized as ‘brutal,’… involving as it does ‘tear[ing] [a fetus] apart’ and ‘rip[ping] off’ its limbs.” [Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 181, 182]
The Court essentially encouraged states to bar abortion methods that, ”might cause the medical profession or society as a whole to become insensitive, even disdainful, to life…” Stenberg v. Carhart, 530 U.S. 914, 961
Barbarism is exactly what the Kansas and Oklahoma legislature intended to stop when enacting the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act, yet both states have been blocked by court injunctions from allowing this law to go into effect.
LOWER COURT ADOPTS ABORTION POSITION
Shawnee District Court Judge Larry Hendricks has apparently not read the relevant U.S. Supreme Court rulings. His decision to issue an injunction in June (read more here) blocking the Act declared that it:
- would be an unacceptable limitation (“undue burden”) on the so-called right to abortion created by Roe in 1973 (as the abortion attorneys interpret it) and
- violates an even broader “right” to abortion that the judge says exists in our 1859-adopted Kansas Constitution.
The argument that Kansas has any right to abortion enshrined in our state Constitution has repeatedly been rebutted and called “a fantasy” in filings from the Attorney General.
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Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court said in Gonzales that abortionists do not have any right to demand certain procedures:“Physicians are not entitled to ignore regulations that direct them to use reasonable alternative procedures. The law need not give abortion doctors unfettered choice in the course of their medical practice.” [Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 163]
The abortionists’ argument that the Dismemberment Abortion ban restricts a “common” method is actually a plea that they be allowed to keep methods that are more expeditious and profitable for them.
Kansans for Life’s amicus brief amplifies why this Act conforms to the U.S. Supreme Court’s position that some abortion methods are unacceptable and “will further coarsen society to the humanity of not only newborns, but all vulnerable and innocent human life, making it increasingly difficult to protect such life.’ “[Gonzales v. Carhart, 550 U.S. 124, 156-157]
LifeNews.com Note: Kathy Ostrowski is the legislative director for Kansans for Life, the state affiliate to the National Right to Life Committee.
