KS Senate tries again to ban telemedicine abortion, despite August vote and court order [The Kansas City Star]

Kansas City Star (MO)

The Kansas Legislature on Wednesday voted on abortion for the first time since voters in August overwhelmingly rejected giving lawmakers the power to enact a ban.

State senators took a voice vote to advance a bill banning medication abortions by telemedicine even as an existing state law to do the same thing is blocked by a court. The Kansas Senate will take a final vote on the bill Thursday before sending it to the Kansas House.

Legislation to prohibit abortion providers from purchasing professional liability insurance from the public Kansas Health Care Stabilization Fund also received initial approval in the Senate.

While the bills are the first abortion-related proposals to come before either the Kansas House or Senate this year, lawmakers have introduced numerous measures including legislation to ban abortion and allow local governments to regulate it. Lawmakers have prioritized legislation offering tax credits to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

Though the telemedicine bill is all but certain to face legal challenges, the support for it among Kansas Republicans shows a sustained interest in pursuing abortion restrictions months after 60% of Kansans voted to retain state-level rights to the procedure. GOP lawmakers have sought to cast the telemedicine abortion as risky even though the drugs used are considered safe by federal authorities.

“This is not forbidding chemical abortions through medication. It is only saying not through telemedicine because of the risks and dangers of that without being present with a doctor,” said state Sen. Beverly Gossage, a Eudora Republican who chairs the Senate Public Health and Welfare Committee.

State Sen. Pat Pettey, a Kansas City Democrat and the committee’s ranking minority member, said medication abortion is “extremely safe.”

“What we are talking about in this bill is that on Aug. 2 there was a decisive vote in Kansas where nearly 70 percent of Kansans said they did not want to ban access to female bodily autonomy,” Pettey said, misstating the percentage of the vote by 10%.

Last year a Kansas judge issued a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the state’s legislation requiring in-person appointments for abortions. Planned Parenthood began booking remote appointments for patients in December.

Telemedicine abortion is viewed as an important tool for patients in remote parts of the state who may struggle to travel to any of Kansas’ five abortion clinics in Wichita and the Kansas City metro area.

In written testimony against the bill Martha Pink and Jacqueline Lightcap, co chairs of the League of Women Voters of Kansas, said they were “surprised and insulted” by the legislation so soon after the vote.

“There is no reason for this harmful legislation and no reason to think it would withstand judicial scrutiny should it pass,” they said in written testimony.

The bill’s supporters have argued that medication abortion, which makes up the majority of abortions in Kansas, are unsafe and require physician supervision. However, the Food and Drug Administration has authorized the drug for use without supervision, deeming it to be safe.

The debate over telemedicine abortion came after the Kansas Senate gave first-round approval to a bill that prohibits providers that offer elective abortions from accessing the Kansas Health Care Stabilization Fund, which was created by a state law in 1976 and is overseen by a board of governors. The fund provides excess professional liability coverage to health care providers.

Republicans said the fund is a public resource that abortion providers shouldn’t be able to use – comparing the measure as an extension of current prohibitions on taxpayer funding of abortions. Planned Parenthood and Trust Women, which offer abortions in Kansas, didn’t take a public position on the legislation during a hearing last week.

The Star’s Jenna Barackman contributed reporting