State courts in Kansas and Utah are set to hear arguments in legal challenges to new laws on abortion, as judges tussle with legislatures over how to regulate the medical procedure and its providers after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Those and other state courts have become key venues in the fight over abortion since last year, when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the constitutional right to abortion and made the rules governing it a matter of state laws.
In Kansas, providers are asking a district court judge to block a new restriction on how they dispense abortion medications, as well as older rules governing what doctors must tell patients and a required 24-hour wait between the first in-person consultation and the procedure.
In Utah, the state Supreme Court is expected to weigh a lower court's decision to put a law banning most abortions on hold more than a year ago.
In both states, the impact of the overturning of Roe remains unsettled as legislatures push to tighten laws surrounding abortion and the doctors and clinics who provide them wage fierce court battles.
Judges have struck down only a few such bans in the year since Roe's overturning, including in permanently blocking a ban in South Carolina on abortions after cardiac activity can be detected and, in Arizona, preventing the enforcement of a ban against doctors that pre-dated Roe v. Wade.
Like in Arizona, the June 2022 Supreme Court decision has put longstanding laws under new scrutiny. The waiting period and other requirements that Judge K. Christopher Jayaram will consider in his courtroom in the Kansas City area have been in place for more than a quarter century.
But Kansas has become an outlier on abortion among states with Republican-controlled Legislatures because of a 2019 decision by the state Supreme Court declaring access a matter of bodily autonomy and a “fundamental” right under the state constitution. Voters in 2022 decisively affirmed that abortion rights would remain protected — after anti-abortion groups warned that many of the state’s existing restrictions could fall.
The new law, which took effect July 1, requires providers to tell patients that a medication abortion can be stopped once it is started with a regimen that major medical groups call unproven and potentially dangerous. The state and the providers mutually agreed that the new law wouldn’t be enforced at least until the state court could decide the matter.
By SAM METZ and JOHN HANNA Associated Press