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Planned Parenthood lawsuit hopes to undermine Kansas informed consent and pain law

Jul 3, 2013

By Kathy Ostrowski, legislative director, Kansans for Life

Judge Kathryn Vratil

Judge Kathryn Vratil

Kansas is playing a role in the national abortion drama in which laws passed in ‘red’ states with pro-life legislatures and executive branches are sued by abortion activists to find ‘blue’ courts willing to interfere.

In the past week, two of the four abortion businesses in Kansas challenged the newly enacted “Pro-Life Protections Act.” They didn’t do well in the preliminary injunction phase; virtually the entire Act went into effect Monday with only two minor provisions held back for further court scrutiny in state court, courtesy of litigation by the Center for Women’s Health.

In federal court, Planned Parenthood struck out on their attempt to block an informed consent section of the law. Rejecting their request for extraordinary relief was chief federal judge Kathryn Vratil, who found, in the main, Planned Parenthood had no likelihood of succeeding. Judge Vratil has scheduled an expedited schedule of motions and rebuttals with a hearing July 29.

The state court suit and its content will be covered in future articles, but the media is now focusing on Planned Parenthood’s federal suit and two of its three complaints:

1) whether clinics have to describe the state informed consent website as medically accurate and 2) whether unborn children’s pain capability is relevant to the abortion decision.

On the first issue, in 1997 Kansas enacted a 24-hour period of reflection and access to state-prepared abortion informational materials. Kansas completed an online upgrade in 2011 with 4-D ultrasound-enhanced gestation education. Generally, Kansas abortion businesses had websites by that time and have been voluntarily including hyperlinks to the Kansas Dept of Health (KDHE) “Woman’s Right to Know” website.

The abortionists’ lawsuits complain about the content of the state’s right to know information which the law requires them to provide a hyperlink on the abortionist’s homepage. But what abortion businesses really resent is that the tagline positions the state information as medically authoritative.

The tagline says the information is “objective, nonjudgmental, and scientifically accurate.” The abortion industry fears this might just encourage the woman to actually hit the hyperlink, read the information. and look at ultrasound movies of active, living babies who are the same gestational age as hers.

The situation is akin to the tobacco industry having to print individual cigarette pack warnings that say that the U.S. Surgeon General has determined that smoking causes lung cancer. For decades, the deadly connection between tobacco products and cancer was suppressed.

In the case of abortion, the U.S. Supreme Court said in its 1992 Casey ruling that the state may provide just such ‘competing” information to the woman.

The second issue is the relatively newer issue of pain capability in unborn children of a certain age. The Associated Press has cited a one-sentence denial of that capability which was issued in 2005 by “ACOG,” which most readers would think of as a group of impartial obstetricians. In truth, ACOG is a self-serving trade association, falsely trying to pose as a voice of authority.

That a baby in the womb can indeed feel excruciating pain by 20 weeks fetal age (post fertilization) is certainly relevant to mothers–particularly those of babies in the second trimester—who are considering abortion at Planned Parenthood in Kansas.

The abortion attorneys try to muddy the issue by citing a study in which the authors say evidence of pain is weaker before the thirds trimester when the baby’s cortex is formed. But those authors were surveying research before the 2007 landmark study, “Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: a challenge for neuroscience and medicine.”

That study, and others afterward, showed substantial medical evidence that the brain structure of the thalamus, rather than the cerebral cortex, is principally responsible for pain perception. While the cerebral cortex may affect reaction to and modulation of perceived pain, children born missing most of the cerebral cortex, those with hydranancephaly, nevertheless experience pain. In adults, stimulation or ablation (loss) of the cerebral cortex does not alter pain perception, while stimulation or ablation of the thalamus does. Please see www.doctorsonfetalpain.com/fetal-pain-the-evidence/#.UdMikzu1GBQ for references.

The Kansas Legislature passed a law in 2011 protecting pain-capable unborn children from abortion at 20 weeks or later and this current lawsuit is a backdoor way to get the court to undermine that ban. At this point the federal court is interested in the research.

Planned Parenthood would love to get any ruling undermining that truth. We intend not to help them.

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Categories: Judicial