by Marshall Thompson
Kansas has a new law that requires its abortion clinics, all three of them, to meet new regulatory standards and apply for annual licenses. The new standards require major renovations to existing clinic buildings that may be impossible to accomplish in time. The broad law gives the state’s secretary of health and environment several different avenues for denying licenses, exposing what is clearly the anti-abortion pretext for the law.
One Kansas anti-abortion activist group was less nuanced on this point. “We have doubts that any of the abortion clinics can meet the safety requirements of the new law,” said Troy Newman, the president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, in a press release. “If they cannot comply, all three abortion clinics would be forced to cease abortion operations, making Kansas the first abortion-free state in the nation.”
Except, Kansas will not be abortion-free. For a state to truly be abortion-free, it would have to tackle the circumstances that create a need for abortions in the first place: lack of sex education, lack of access to birth control, rape, incest, maternal mortality, etc. Instead, Kansas has only succeeded in being the first state to be free from safe and humane abortions.