TOPEKA, Kan. — For the first time since Kansas voters upheld the state right to an abortion, Kansas lawmakers sent a bill on the topic to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s desk.
The Kansas House voted 86 to 36 Tuesday to pass a bill requiring physicians to provide care to infants “born alive” during an abortion and report data to the state when it happens — even as abortion providers and medical experts say it does not happen.
Kelly has consistently expressed support for abortion rights and has vetoed new regulations in the past, but the House and Senate both approved the legislation with more than the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto.
Similar legislation has been pushed by anti-abortion groups nationwide at the state and federal level. Physicians are already required to provide care under existing Kansas law and federal law specific to abortion passed more than a decade ago. The new Kansas law, however, would apply criminal penalties if a Kansas abortion doctor fails to act.
Proponents have painted a picture of infants left to die if they are born during a failed abortion. The legislation, they say, ensures that does not happen.
“We’re talking about human life here folks,” Rep. John Eplee, an Abilene Republican and family physician, said during a debate on the bill last month. “This bill is our best attempt to provide guidelines, guardrails with practitioners that we do as much as we can.”
But abortion providers say it is unnecessary government overreach that could prevent palliative care if an infant is born before viability. The situation abortion opponents are seeking to avoid does not happen in modern care, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
Rep. Susan Ruiz, a Shawnee Democrat, spoke against the bill on the grounds that it could require physicians to transport an infant to a hospital rather than allow parents to hold it.
“The mother, the father, the family have the right to ask for palliative care,” Ruiz said.
States that do collect data on these situations have found a small number of cases. In 2021 Texas reported 1 born alive case among more than 53,000 abortions. According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an anti-abortion research center, there have been 111 cases over the past five years in Arizona, Florida, Minnesota and Texas. The details of the cases, and whether the infants survived, are unclear.
“It does happen and the way the abortion industry is trying to erase these individuals, who through their lives have to persevere daily over trauma, pain and complication, it’s just appalling,” said Kelsey Pritchard, director of State Public Affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America, a national anti-abortion group that has advocated for the policy.
