Pro-life and pro-choice advocates butted heads for the second day in a row in the Kansas House Federal and State Affairs Committee over abortion-related legislation. 

In yesterday’s committee, legislators heard testimony on a bill that would alter late-term and partial-birth-abortion laws.

Today, the committee heard testimony on a bill that would give women the ability to view a sonogram of her unborn child and hear the heartbeat of the child prior to receiving an abortion at no added expense.

The “Woman’s Right to Know and See” legislation would also mandate that pregnant women are given contact information for free counseling for medically challenged pregnancies and for free prenatal hospice services.

The proposal, House Bill 2076, also stipulates that the Kansas Department of Health and Environment offer information on alternatives to abortion and on free ultrasound services that are available.

“The underlying issue we can all agree on is that no abortion should be performed without the voluntary consent of the woman,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Lance Kinzer, an Olathe Republican. “This is beneficial to both of these principles, making sure abortions are only performed when the woman has all the information.”

Kinzer said the legislation was similar in many ways to existing laws, and that the legislation is an update on current law reflecting improvements made in technology.

Kinzer also said that existing law already indicates that a woman is supposed to be provided with physical and anatomical characteristics of the unborn child.

“What better way to provide her with accurate information than allowing her to see not to just what some other child might look like but what her unborn child does look like at this time,” he said.

Kay Lyn Carlson, director of the Abortion Recovery Center in Topeka, spoke as a supporter of the legislation. Carlson received an abortion when she was 17-years-old and was told at the time in the abortion clinic that her unborn child was just a "glob of tissue."

Carlson said her life spiraled out of control after viewing the sonogram during her second pregnancy, eight years after the abortion, in which she saw her baby’s hand.

“The sad reality was that the baby I was seeing on the screen was younger than the baby I had aborted,” she said. “This was not a glob of tissue.”

Holly Weatherford, lobbyist for Planned Parenthood, and Julie Burkhart, lobbyist for ProKanDo, provided testimony in opposition to the bill.

“Women are best served when they are able to make these decisions for themselves and their families without government interference,” Burkhart said.

Kathy Ostrowski, legislative director for Kansans for Life, also testified as a backer of the legislation. She said she was not surprised by what she heard from the opposition.

“I am always waiting for them to say this is something we already do and that we support women, but instead they try to come up with tiny technical misrepresentations of the bill,” Ostrowski told Kansas Liberty.

- Holly Smith

Resources

• House Bill 2076: http://www.kslegislature.org/bills/2010/2076.pdf

The Week in Review