DISTRICT COURT INJUNCTION ALLOWS
DISMEMBERMENT ABORTIONS TO CONTINUE IN KANSAS

WASHINGTON – “Dismemberment abortion is the barbaric killing of an innocent human being,” said Mary Spaulding Balch, J.D., National Right to Life director of state legislation in reaction to a Kansas District Court injunction, which will allow dismemberment abortions to continue in the state. Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks granted a temporary injunction against Kansas’ Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act, which was to take effect July 1.

“Today’s injunction leaves unborn children vulnerable to painful death by dismemberment,” said Spaulding Balch. "The fact that the practice of dismembering an innocent, living unborn child is legally protected killing should outrage people everywhere. Dismembering living unborn children needs to be outlawed.”

Based on model legislation from National Right to Life, the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act was passed overwhelmingly by both houses of the Kansas legislature earlier this year, and was signed by pro-life Gov. Sam Brownback. The law would protect a living unborn child from being dismembered “by extracting him one piece at a time from his mother’s uterus through use of clamps, grasping forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush, and /or grasp a portion of the unborn child’s body to cut or rip it off.”

In his dissent to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2000 Stenberg v. Carhart decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy observed that in dismemberment abortions, "The fetus, in many cases, dies just as a human adult or child would: It bleeds to death as it is torn limb from limb. The fetus can be alive at the beginning of the dismemberment process and can survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off."

A medical illustration of a D&E dismemberment abortion is available here: www.nrlc.org/abortion/pba/deabortiongraphic.

Background materials on the bill are available on the National Right to Life website at www.nrlc.org/statelegislation/dismemberment.

Founded in 1968, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the federation of 50 state right-to-life affiliates and more than 3,000 local chapters, is the nation's oldest and largest grassroots pro-life organization. Recognized as the flagship of the pro-life movement, NRLC works through legislation and education to protect innocent human life from abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide and euthanasia.

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