Kansas may soon have another “first” to nail on the barn door.
When Gov. Sam Brownback vetoed the appropriation the Legislature made for the Kansas Arts Commission, that made Kansas number one: The first of the 50 states to say no to the arts; to refuse to take federal subsidies to help make cultural attractions more widely available.
Another number one rating may grow from the fact that the Legislature took away federal funding for family planning clinics with a sneaky tactic: it passed a law requiring the state’s portion of federal family planning dollars go first to public health departments and hospitals, leaving no money for Planned Parenthood and similar groups. Gov. Brownback also signed that bill into law.
To make the culture of oppression even more virulent, the lawmakers passed stringent new requirements on abortion providers that are tougher to meet than those governing other hospitals or clinics. One family planning clinic has already been denied a license as a consequence.
Peter Brownlie, the Planned Parenthood chapter’s president and chief executive officer, told reporters in a press conference that “the climate is one of sustained assaults on the fundamental rights of women to health care.”
It is altogether possible that Kansas will also become the first state in which there will be no legal abortion clinic in operation.
To avoid this, Planned Parenthood filed a federal lawsuit in Kansas City Monday. Further lawsuits challenging discriminatory legislation are expected. Months will pass before these efforts succeed or fail.
THE ANTI-ABORTION actions taken by the Legislature and applauded by the governor are assaults on poor women and on girls and young women who lack support from family or friends. Almost all of the clients of Planned Parenthood clinics are people with low incomes. Public clinics also are the only place that low-income women can go for birth control pills and other contraceptives they can afford. Shutting down the clinics will result in more unplanned pregnancies and more abortions.
Some of those abortions will be done by untrained people, with primitive equipment, in unsterile conditions. Infections will result. Some will prove fatal.
Women seeking an abortion who have assets will go outside Kansas for their health care. It’s the poor who will take the risks and suffer the consequences — the poor and the young from autocratic homes who are afraid to go to parents for help. Another new Kansas law requires parental permission before an abortion can be performed for a minor. That law was passed to make certain that girls who get in trouble will be severely punished. (The spirit of the Salem witch trials still lives!)
What the Legislature and the governor did in this year of Our Lord, 2011, was to do their best to take health care for Kansas women back to the days before Roe v. Wade (1973). Abortion was illegal then. Which meant back alley abortions for the poor; a flight to Sweden for the rich.
But Kansas women will have it better than their mothers and grandmothers did, pre-1973. They won’t have to fly to Sweden. They will be able to go, instead, to one of the other 49 states where women are provided the health care they seek by trained professionals in well-managed clinics. And if they muddy-up their license tags and are discrete, nobody will need to know they call Kansas home.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
