Kansas bill lets doctors deny chemotherapy to pregnant women

For a long time, but more intensely the past two years, the states have been in a contest to see who can pass the most restrictive anti-abortion laws.

Denying insurance coverage, setting gestational age limits, mandating ultrasounds, defunding Planned Parenthood and other public providers, requiring hospital privileges, demanding providers' credentials, lengthening waiting periods, restricting medical school's curriculums and even laying out the size of clinic closets are all fodder for the forced-birthers to dick around with if it means they can make it more difficult for women to obtain a medical procedure that the Supreme Court says is their inherent right.

The ultimate goal, as the Republican-controlled Mississippi legislature and Republican governor made clear with passage of a bill that will shut down the last abortion clinic in the state, is to make exercising that right impossible.

In Kansas, doctors and nurses are now encouraged by law to lie about abortion by saying it increases breast-cancer risk.

And now the Republican-dominated Kansas House and Senate have added another provision to its already prodigious collection of regulations seeking to give the state sovereignty over women's wombs. The Republican governor is certain to sign the monstrous bill in which this provision is contained. As the Kansas City Star warns in an editorial:

That bill [...] extends the state's 'conscience' provision for medical personnel to include the right to refuse to refer a woman to an abortion provider, or prescribe or administer a prescription or treatment that terminates a pregnancy.

Taken to its extreme, the legislation could empower doctors and medical staffers to refuse to provide birth control or even chemotherapy to a pregnant cancer patient.

Not only will this allow physicians to refuse to provide treatment on "moral" grounds, they will not be required to explain why they aren't providing the treatment, and they can also refuse to refer patients to other physicians would provide the treatment.

An outrage? That hardly covers it. This is downright evil.

Whatever happened to: "First, do no harm"?