The Quickie: Fetal Personhood, Invasive Reporting Next On Kansas Lawmakers' Dangerous Agenda

Welcome to “The Quickie” — Planned Parenthood Action Fund’s daily tipsheet on the top health care & reproductive rights stories of the day. You can read “The Quickie'' online here.

In today’s Quickie: Kansas lawmakers’ dangerous agenda and anti-abortion centers made over $1 billion the year Roe was overturned.

FETAL PERSONHOOD, INVASIVE REPORTING NEXT ON KANSAS LAWMAKERS’ DANGEROUS AGENDA: Kansas lawmakers are again trying to sneak laws undermining reproductive freedom past the public, this time with a measure that furthers the myth of “fetal personhood.” SB 425, which was heard in committee on Monday, would allow pregnant people to claim child support any time after conception. That might seem like support for pregnant people’s health — but the measure is a shroud for a new statutory definition of “child” that would include any embryo, “in utero, at any stage of gestation.” 

“This is a tactic that is used to make it easier to enact anti-abortion laws down the road,” Taylor Morton of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes told the Kansas Reflector. “It is in direct opposition to broad public support for abortion access in Kansas. Furthermore, you know, the lack of clarity in this bill really makes it unworkable.”

That’s not all on the agenda this week: today, House lawmakers will hear HB 2749, which would require medical providers to ask patients invasive, medically unnecessary questions about their personal lives as part of the state’s abortion reporting requirements. That includes asking patients to rank their reasons for having an abortion — a question that should be a patient’s business and theirs alone. 

 

ANTI-ABORTION CENTERS MADE OVER A BILLION DOLLARS THE YEAR ROE WAS OVERTURNED: In the fiscal year 2022, anti-abortion centers, also called crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), made $1.4 billion in revenue, which includes $344 million in government funding. The Guardian reported on the analysis of the centers’ tax documents, which shows an increase in state and federal grants and overall growth in the industry. Jennifer McKenna, from Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, which analyzed the documents, explains, “Taxpayers deserve performance standards and hard metrics for use of their dollars on these centers.”

CPCs are fake reproductive health centers that endanger patients and are widely considered unethical by health care professionals. These centers are not licensed medical providers and routinely coerce, deceive, and manipulate patients into carrying pregnancies to term, regardless of what patients want. Pregnant patients deserve high-quality, accurate medical information from licensed professionals when making decisions about their health. Government funding should go to legitimate sexual and reproductive health care organizations that can support and provide safe care to patients. 

Read more in The Guardian.