Abortion rights group sues Kansas over country's first ban on fetal procedure

Associated Press in Wichita, Kansas
Monday 1 June 2015 23.20 BST

An abortion-rights group challenged Kansas’ first-in-the-nation ban on a second-trimester procedure that anti-abortion activists describe as dismembering a fetus.

The lawsuit filed Monday in Shawnee County District Court by the Center for Reproductive Rights asks the court to declare the law unconstitutional and block it from taking effect in July as scheduled. The suit was filed on behalf of two doctors at the Center for Women’s Health in Overland Park.

Governor Sam Brownback signed the legislation 7 April. The measure had been proposed by the National Right to Life Committee as model legislation, and Oklahoma enacted its own law days after Kansas.

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Under the new law, doctors would be banned from using forceps, clamps, scissors or similar instruments on a live fetus to remove it from the womb in pieces. Such instruments are commonly used in dilation and evacuation procedures performed during the second trimester.

The lawsuit contends that the procedure is the most common method of ending a pregnancy after 14 weeks, and is used in 95% of second-trimester abortions nationwide. It says the ban means a woman seeking a second-trimester abortion would instead have to submit to more complex and risky medical procedures.

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