The Kansas Court of Appeals just recently refused to allow the state's first-in-the-nation ban on a common second-trimester abortion method to take effect. The 14 judges included in the ruling had a split decision that the Kansas Constitution protects abortion rights independent of the U.S. Constitution.
According to The Topeka Capital-Journal, the court's judges, 14 in total, had a split decision on whether the state's ban on the procedures being followed in second-term abortions are unconstitutional. With that, the first 7-7 ruling in the court's history means a district court's ruling is blocking the law from taking effect. And Kansas law suggests that when appellate courts are equally divided, the lower ruling will be followed.
Tie votes uphold the ruling being appealed, meaning that the ruling on Friday is taking sides with the Shawnee County judge who put the 2015 law on hold while he considers the lawsuit, which takes on challenges to the ban. The lawsuit has yet to go to trial, but the judge claimed that the Kansas Constitution's general language about the personal liberties stretches out to abortion rights, which the appeals court also supported.
"The rights of Kansas women in 2016 are not limited to those specifically intended by the men who drafted our state's constitution in 1859," Judge Steve Leben wrote via ABC News in a statement on behalf of the seven judges who took sides with the lower court. The state will also plea to the Kansas Supreme Court, Attorney General Derek Schmidt stated while adding that the split decision offered little transparency on the constitutional questions.
The dismemberment abortion bill, being slated as a landmark legislation by opponents of abortion, is the first in the nation to ban doctors from using forceps and other instruments to remove a live fetus from a woman's womb. But then, abortion rights supporters argue that dilation and evacuation is the safest way for second-term abortions to happen and it is also considered as the most common. Two abortion clinic owners from Overland Park filed suit last year to stop S.B. 95, arguing it placed an unfair burden on their right to perform abortions.
The New York Times also reported that in fact, last June, Judge Larry D. Hendricks of Shawnee County District Court in Topeka blocked enforcement of the new law pending a trial. He based his decision on the due process article in the Kansas Constitution, which he claimed that offered the same protection of abortion rights as those afforded by the 14th Amendment to the federal Constitution. He also stated that the ban on what doctors called the safest method for many patients presented an illegal complication.
Meanwhile, split decisions in the Kansas Court of Appeals are highly remarkable because almost all decisions are made by three-judge panels. The court's public information officer even supported such notion by claiming that it is hardly ever that the full court hear a case, as it did on this matter, and even more rarely does the court have split rulings.
