It’s one of those stories that could have written pretty much anytime over, say, the last 18 months. The headline to AP reporter John Hanna’s story (as published last week in the Washington Post) is “Kansas abortion foes brace for state Supreme Court decision.” Hanna is alluded to the mysterious inaction of the Kansas Supreme Court which heard a state challenge to a lower court injunction that enjoined Kansas’s ban on dismemberment abortions nearly two years ago. The consensus across the board was that a majority of the justices seemed favorably disposed to the bizarre argument that 160 years after the state Constitution was drafted, a hitherto unknown right to privacy even broader than the Supreme Court found in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, had been discovered.

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1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton Decisions Legalized Abortion in the U.S. for theFull Nine Months of Pregnancy Prior to 1967, abortion was prohibited in all 50 states except when the mother’s life was in danger. Between 1967 and 1973, 18 states added further exceptions, mostly to allow abortion in cases of rape and incest, or for certain limited medical reasons, or on demand (New York). In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered two decisions, Roe v. Wade 1 and Doe v. Bolton 2 which, taken together, have allowed legal abortion on demand at any stage of pregnancy in all 50 states. The two original decisions established legal abortion as follows: In the first three months of pregnancy, no one can interfere with a woman’s decision to abort her child. After the first three months, but before the “viability” of the unborn child, an individual state can enact laws to protect the health of the mother but cannot prohibit the abortion of the unborn child. After “viability” of the unborn child, an individual state can, if it chooses to do so, enact laws to protect the unborn child but abortion must be allowed if the life or “health” of the mother is at stake. The Supreme Court defined “health” as “the medical judgment that may be exercised in light of all factors – physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age –relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health.” 2 Consequently, the broad definition of “health” has made abortion legal up to the moment of birth.

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