KY panel approves anti-abortion bills as opponents dress in Handmaid’s Tale costumes
Two more anti-abortion bills before the Kentucky General Assembly — one codifying the state Attorney General’s ability to prosecute violators of state abortion statutes, and the other dictating the terms for disposal of fetal remains — won approval from a House committee on Wednesday.
These proposals are two of seven anti-abortion bills currently before lawmakers. Others include House Bill 67, from state Rep. Joseph Fischer, R-Fort Thomas, which would amend the state constitution to remove Kentuckians’ guaranteed right to an abortion, and Senate Bill 90, from Sen. Steve Meredith, R-Leitchfield. It would create a “conscience” exemption for health care providers, giving anyone with a “religious, moral, ethical or philosophical” belief the chance to opt out of administering care without retribution and limit one’s liability for doing so.
Speaking to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, where the crowd of public onlookers was peppered with several people silently protesting in white bonnets and red capes, modeling characters from the Handmaid’s Tale, Republican state Reps. Stan Lee of Lexington and Nancy Tate of Brandenburg presented their bills.
Lee said his proposal, House Bill 451, serves to codify existing powers and “statutory duties” of the attorney general as the state’s chief law enforcement officer in cases where, for example, health providers or facilities perform unlawful abortions. Specifically, it would broaden the AG’s authority to seek civil and criminal penalties for all abortion law violators, beyond just seeking injunctive relief.
“This is not creating any new penalty or any new criminal violation, but rather it is allowing the attorney general to prosecute a violation of that law,” Lee said. Typically, such a violation would fall to a commonwealth attorney to litigate, according to statute.
The other bill, House Bill 370, would place tight restrictions on how fetal remains from an abortion are disposed of, either by medical providers or parents within 10 days, and threaten violators with a Class D felony charge.
Tate’s proposal draws heavily from a 2016 law passed in Indiana, which aggressively regulated the medical practice, and included the requirement that aborted fetal remains be disposed of in the same way as human remains. The controversial measure was legally challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices last May sided with Indiana lawmakers and upheld that provision of the law requiring fetal remains be cremated or buried.
Cathie Humbarger, executive director of Right to Life of Northeast Indiana, who testified in favor of Tate’s bill on Wednesday, said part of what prompted the Indiana Legislature to pass that 2016 law was her organization’s investigations, which “exposed the ugly underbelly of the abortion industries.”
That, she said, included “incinerating bodies with medical waste, pouring bodies down the drain, grinding bodies in garbage disposals and flushing bodies down the toilet.”
Humbarger also referenced the disturbing case of Dr. Ulrich Klopfer, who provided abortions in Indiana over about 40 years, and, after his death in 2019, when his family was searching his Illinois home and car, was found to have hoarded 2,411 medically-preserved fetal remains.
Tate’s bill would make it a Class D felony to “flush fetal remains down the toilet, throw away, cremate or bury fetal remains in any place other than a licensed facility,” and bar anyone from accepting “money or anything of value for an aborted fetus or fetal remains.”
Tate, who offered no evidence that improper disposal practices were taking place in Kentucky, said the costs for providers to dispose of fetal remains “would be exactly the same” as it is now.
But that’s likely not the case, since most abortion providers don’t have onsite cremation services. An abortion provider, instead, would be required to hire a cremation service or funeral home for disposal.
Indiana Deputy Solicitor General Julia Payne said it cost some of the abortion providers in her state between $6 and $12 for disposal under the new law, because they had to hire funeral homes for cremation.
Tamarra Wieder, state political director for Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, which opposes both bills, said in a statement that “abortion access is in great danger, and what is happening in Kentucky has little to do with health care and everything to do with control. This is why you are seeing handmaids at the Capitol.”
Committee members voted along party lines for both bills, with only Republicans supporting both measures. Both bills now move to the full House for a vote.
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 4:39 PM.
