Women's Human Rights in KY Now Hanging By First Amendment Thread

Not because object rape on women receiving legal medical care is a medieval abomination.

Not because legal medical procedures between a doctor and a woman are nobody's fucking business.

Not because women are human beings who are being denied basic human rights.

No. Because docs gotta have free speech.

Darcy Costello at the Courier:

A Kentucky law requiring doctors who conduct abortions to first perform ultrasounds and describe the image to the patient violates the First Amendment rights of those physicians, according to a federal judge.

U.S. District Judge David Hale ruled Wednesday in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union's challenge to the law, made on behalf of the state's sole abortion provider, EMW Women's Surgical Center, and barred the state from enforcing it. 

"This is a vindication of the rights of Kentucky women and their physicians, and it marks a significant victory against the General Assembly's overreach into the area of reproductive healthcare," William Sharp, the legal director of the ACLU of Kentucky, wrote in a news release.

House Bill 2, which was later signed into law, mandates that medical professionals perform an ultrasound on a woman and simultaneously explain what it is depicting before the woman provides consent for an abortion. Doctors also have to display the images and, if possible, let the woman listen to the fetal heartbeat. 

Hale writes in his opinion, issued late Wednesday, that the law "appears to inflict psychological harm on abortion patients."

"Requiring physicians to force upon their patients the information mandated by H.B. 2 has more potential to harm the psychological well-being of the patient than to further the legitimate interests of the Commonwealth," he writes. 

At a March hearing on the case, lawyer M. Stephen Pitt, who represented the Cabinet for Health and family Services, the state agency that oversees abortion clinics, said the law was meant to protect women who might regret abortions or may not fully understand the procedure.