Summary

On June 6, 2023, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood filed a lawsuit in state court challenging several onerous, harmful Kansas abortion restrictions that greatly diminish access to care. Kansas’s restrictions, some of which were scheduled to go into effect on July 1, 2023, force providers to convey inaccurate medical information and impose arbitrary bureaucratic requirements that delay time-sensitive care.

On October 30, 2023 a Kansas state court issued a temporary injunction blocking several of these laws from going into effect, including restrictions that compel providers to convey false government-scripted information to patients and impose unjustified requirements that threaten patients’ health. 

 On August 4, 2026 a Kansas state court permanently struck down this litany of abortion restrictions, ruling that the laws violate patients’ fundamental right to personal autonomy, health care providers’ right to free speech, and the right to equal protection under the state constitution. This decision will help ensure that abortion remains protected and accessible in Kansas, where, in 2022, residents overwhelmingly voted to protect the state’s constitutional right to abortion.

About the Biased Counseling Scheme

About the Biased Counseling Scheme

State lawmakers passed an amendment to supercharge the Kansas Woman’s Right to Know Act (or “Biased Counseling Scheme”) just eight months after Kansan voters overwhelmingly rejected efforts to eliminate the fundamental right to abortion from the state constitution.

The restrictions being challenged in the lawsuit include:

• A requirement that all patients are given inaccurate state-mandated information before they can receive care, including medically unfounded statements that abortion poses a “risk of premature birth in future pregnancies” and “risk of breast cancer”.
• Arbitrary bureaucratic requirements that delay access to time-sensitive care, such as insisting that the state-mandated information given to patients conform to a specific typeface, font size, and color.
• A medically unnecessary rule forcing patients to wait 30 minutes after meeting with their provider before they may receive abortion care.
• A law requiring providers to relay to their patients at least five times that medication abortion can be “reversed”—a false, and potentially dangerous, claim unsupported by scientific evidence.

About the case

About the case

On October 30, 2023, a Kansas state trial court temporarily blocked the restrictions pending the Center’s challenge.

On May 20, 2024, the Center filed a legal challenge to HB 2749—a new law that forces providers to report to the state patients’ reasons for seeking abortion—and asked the court to add the challenge to this case. HB 2749 requires providers to interrogate patients’ reasons for seeking an abortion, such as financial difficulty, a threat to their health posed by pregnancy, or the pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. It also requires providers to collect and report to the state other sensitive information about patients’ personal lives.

In the lawsuit, the Center argued that the restrictions violate the state constitution, including providers’ right to free speech and their patients’ right to abortion. 

Specifically, the Center argued that the challenged restrictions:

• Imposes unique, additional “informed consent” requirements on abortion that it does not impose on any other health care in Kansas.
• Undermines informed consent and its underlying ethical principles by forcing providers to disseminate inaccurate and/or misleading information to their patients.
• Harms the health and safety of people seeking abortion by delaying time-sensitive health care, requiring providers to force potentially traumatizing information on their patients, and mandating that providers convey medically inaccurate information that poses threats to patients’ safety.
• Stigmatizes abortion care and discriminates against pregnant people seeking abortion care by perpetuating the demeaning view that people seeking abortions are uniquely incapable of making informed health care decisions.
• Invades and jeopardizes patients’ privacy.

About the rulings

About the rulings

In its October 30, 2023 decision temporarily enjoining the Biased Counseling Scheme, the Kansas state court ruled that there is no “credible scientific/medical evidence that the ‘reversal’ therapy proposed in the Amendment actually ‘affect’ the effects of mifepristone. Indeed, the overwhelming weight of credible evidence, given this record, suggests that such a theory is misleading, untested, potentially-dangerous for women, and speculative.” The court further stated that “the State’s rationale and schemes… violate the fundamental rights of ‘free speech’ held by the provider plaintiffs.”

In granting a temporary injunction, the court further declared that it was “skeptical” the Act’s requirements effectuated a genuine State interest, instead characterizing the Biased Counseling Scheme as a “thinly-veiled effort to stigmatize the procedure and instill fear in patients that are contemplating an abortion, such that they make an alternative choice, based upon disproven and unsupportable claims.”

On August 4, 2026 a Kansas state court permanently struck down the abortion restrictions. The court held that the challenged restrictions are “antithetical to and a significant encumbrance on a woman’s right to self-determination regarding her reproductive future.” The court further stated that “[t]hese draconian processes, which have “ballooned” over time and exist in no other articulated healthcare context in Kansas, have resulted in emotional trauma and stress for plaintiffs, their staff, and their patients.” The 2022 voter-approved amendment to the state constitution protected the right to abortion; this win ensures Kansans continue to have access to care.

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