The court sided in a 6-1 majority with the plaintiffs in the case, two physicians who performed the procedure, in a ruling that opens the door for abortion-rights activists to challenge a series of other restrictions that the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature has enacted.
At the heart of the Kansas decision is a 2015 law that would ban so-called dilation and evacuation procedures, a common method of abortion in the second trimester in which a physician uses surgical instruments and other equipment to take the fetus out of a woman’s uterus.
Kansas was the first state to pass such a law in 2015, said Elizabeth Nash, an abortion legislation expert at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. At least 11 other states have enacted similar bans, she said, though most have been blocked while making their way through the legal system. The bans are in effect in two states: Mississippi and West Virginia. The laws have been promoted by the National Right to Life Committee, an anti-abortion group.
Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, called the ruling “horrendous.”
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Kansas is not the only state to have its law challenged. In Alabama, a similar law was blocked in several decisions, including one by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
A trial court had temporarily blocked the law in Kansas, finding the state constitution protected a right to abortion and, citing U.S. Supreme Court case law, that the ban would present an undue burden to women seeking one. After the state appeals court issued a split ruling, the question went before the Kansas Supreme Court.
The judges in Kansas blocked the law on the basis of the state constitution’s Bill of Rights, ruling that it “affords protection of the right of personal autonomy, which includes the ability to control one’s own body.”
Nash said the ruling could also cause a backlash in Kansas, a conservative state where abortion rights have dwindled in recent years. One possible result, she said, could be an effort by the anti-abortion movement to amend the state constitution so it no longer allows for such a defense.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.