KY health bills to watch: SNAP changes, homicide charges for abortions & vaccines
A bill to block Kentuckians on government assistance for groceries from buying certain junk foods. A bill requiring Medicaid to cover midwifery services. A bill to make ivermectin available for human use. A bill to broaden the parameters of Kentucky’s strict abortion ban. Another to charge someone who gets an abortion with homicide.
The Kentucky General Assembly still has more than a month to go before it wraps up the 30-day, non-budget legislative session. The deadline for filing new legislation has passed — but lawmakers filed more than 1,000 bills before then.
Though most of those bills will not receive a committee hearing or a chance to be voted on before the March 28 adjournment, even the ones that flounder provide insight into the values and priorities of the House and Senate, which are controlled by Republicans. Because the GOP maintains four-fifths majority in both chambers, their leadership controls what’s passed and what isn’t.
Here are some key health-related bills the Herald-Leader is tracking this legislative session:
Freestanding birthing centers
Republicans in the House and Senate have filed bills to establish a licensing process for freestanding birthing centers. They are House Bill 90 from Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Louisville, and Senate Bill 17 from Sen. Shelley Funke Frommeyer, R-Alexandria.
Lawmakers have tried for the last several years to pass licensing regulations to allow for these centers.
Such facilities are intended to fill health care gaps across Kentucky, where women with low-risk pregnancies who want to utilize the services of a midwife might not have reliable access to prenatal care. Senate Bill 17, which was voted out of committee in early February, would remove the certificate of need requirement for establishing such centers.
A related bill from Funk Frommeyer, Senate Bill 16, would require Medicaid to cover midwife services.
Gender-affirming care
Senate Bill 2 from Senate Majority Whip Mike Wilson would block the Kentucky Department of Corrections from providing gender-affirming medication and surgeries to transgender inmates. No gender-affirming surgeries have happened inside state jails or prisons, and medication is provided to inmates only after extensive consultation with a medical provider, officials have told lawmakers.
“I don’t believe our citizens would want their taxpayer dollars being used for those purposes,” Wilson said on the Senate floor in early February.
Senate Republicans, joined by Sen. Robin Webb, D-Grayson, approved the bill. It now heads to the House, where a similar bill, House Bill 5 from Rep. Kim Moser, R-Taylor Mill, is also waiting for a green light.
Moser’s bill wouldn’t block trans inmates’ access to gender-affirming care completely. Instead, it prevents jails and prisons from “initiating” a prescription to a medication that’s considered gender-affirming. Her bill would not apply to a trans inmate who “was undergoing this treatment upon admission to the correctional facility and physical harm would result from its discontinuation,” according to the bill’s language. House Bill 5 has yet to be heard in committee.
A bill more similar to Wilson’s, House Bill 154 from Rep. Josh Calloway, R-Irvington, would block Kentucky Medicare dollars from being spent on gender-affirming medical care for trans adults.
SNAP food restrictions
House Bill 279 from Rep. Matt Lockett, R-Nicholasville would revoke access to certain junk foods for people on food stamps.
Under the bill, any Kentuckian enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, could not use those dollars to pay for “accessory food,” which the bill defines as things like energy drinks, prepared desserts, cookies, candy, ice cream, cakes, pies, potato or corn chips and soft drinks.
Lockett told WKYT the “health and welfare of SNAP participants should be the main priority of this program.”
Since “chronic disease disproportionately affects our low-income population in large part due to the government funding of unhealthy foods,” Lockett added, “SNAP should alleviate hunger, not worsen our national health crisis.”
Sexual assault nurse examiners
House Concurrent Resolution 20 from Rep. Rebecca Raymer, R-Morgantown, would direct the Legislative Research Commission to study access to sexual assault nurse examiners and to submit those findings to health services and judiciary committees by Dec. 1.
Sexual assault nurse examiners, or SANEs, are highly-trained specialized staff on hand in many hospitals and emergency departments around the country to support adults who’ve been sexually assaulted and children who’ve been sexually abused.
Emergency departments are often the first point of contact for someone who has been sexually assaulted, but only 22 hospitals in Kentucky are considered “SANE-ready” as of this month, according to the Cabinet for Health and Family Services. Most of those facilities are in or near cities, including Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green, Owensboro and Florence.
A related bill from Raymer — House Bill 219 — would require hospital emergency departments to train staff on sexual assault emergency requirements and protocols, as well as mandate the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet to create protocols for sexual assault forensic exams, storage of those exam kits as well as establish standards for sexual assault nurse examiners.
COVID-19 and other vaccines
Senate Bill 177 from Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, R-Smithfield, would make it illegal to administer a COVID-19 vaccine — or any mRNA vaccine — to anyone under the age of 18.
The bill would also bar any employers, schools and hospitals from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine “for the purposes of student enrollment, employment or medical treatment.”
Tichenor filed a similar bill in 2024 that would’ve blocked any vaccine mandate conditional to attend school, get a job or professional license, or receive a medical procedure, but it did not pass into law.
Tichenor has called COVID-19 vaccines “ineffective and dangerous,” and in introducing her bill last year, said “tens of thousands of people in the United States have died from this vaccine,” though there is no reliable evidence to support this point.
Another bill co-sponsored by Tichenor this session — Senate Bill 246 — from Sen. Stephen West, R-Paris, mandates that workplaces requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 allow for exemptions based on “sincerely held religious beliefs” or if “the required immunization would be injurious to his or her health.”
House Bill 629 from Rep. Ryan Dotson, R-Winchester, would establish that health care facilities “shall not refuse to provide a health service to a person solely because that person has not received a particular vaccine.”
And House Bill 647 from Rep. Savannah Maddox, R-Dry Ridge, would allow students and faculty at colleges and universities to “opt out” of any immunization policy.
World Health Organization
House Bill 84 from Rep. TJ Roberts would bar the Cabinet for Health and Family Services from enforcing mandates from the World Health Organization – a proposal that aligns with a recent move from Republican President Donald Trump, who withdrew the country from the WHO.
Other bills mirroring causes championed by Trump include Republicans’ House Concurrent Resolution 41 and Senate Concurrent Resolution 61 to establish a Make America Healthy Again Kentucky Task Force to “explore ways to integrate the principles of the Make America Healthy Again movement to improve health outcomes of Kentuckians,” according to the language of both resolutions, which are identical.
Ivermectin
Another Trump-aligned bill filed by Roberts is House Bill 668, to make ivermectin available for “human use” without prescription or consultation with a health care provider.
Ivermectin, a de-worming drug most commonly used on livestock, made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic when people who were skeptical or disbelieving in the efficacy of vaccines to treat the virus suggested taking ivermectin instead.
Then and now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health warn against this, as the drug does not prevent COVID-19 infection, nor does it reduce the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19, and it has little effect on recovery time from the virus.
Abortion
Two mirror bills in the House and Senate would make it a crime for health care providers outside Kentucky to “intentionally” mail abortion-inducing medication to pregnant Kentuckians.
Senate Bill 106 from Sen. Steve Rawlings, R-Burlington, and House Bill 316 from Roberts would make it a Class C felony, punishable by prison time and fines up to $100,000 for knowingly mailing “abortifacent” drugs to a pregnant person in Kentucky.
Both bills also set up a framework for an individual to bring civil action against a person or company who mails that medication.
Another bill proposes adding criminal penalties, not to health care providers aiding and abetting women who want abortions, but to the person getting the abortion.
House Bill 523, also known as the “Prenatal Equal Protection Act” from Rep. Richard White, R-Morehead, would make it legal to punish a woman who gets an abortion with “intentional homicide.”
Under the bill, prosecutors could pursue a criminal case against a woman who gets an abortion using the “same legal principles as would apply to the homicide of a person who had been born alive,” according to the bill.
Abortion is illegal in Kentucky except when a pregnant person’s life is immediately at stake. Health care providers who perform an abortion in violation of the law can be charged with a Class D felony.
Criminal homicide under Kentucky law is when a person is “guilty of causing the death of another human being under circumstances which constitute murder,” first and second degree manslaughter, or reckless homicide.
Kentucky Revised Statutes define “unborn child” as an “individual from fertilization to birth.”
Rep. Emily Callaway, R-Louisville, a co-sponsor of White’s bill, filed a similar version of this proposal in 2023, which quickly drew criticism from some fellow Republicans.
Daniel Cameron, then the attorney general and a Republican gubernatorial candidate, said Callaway’s bill “strikes the wrong balance.”
“In the history of our Commonwealth, the Kentucky General Assembly has never passed a pro-life measure that did not take into consideration the necessity for any exceptions, nor has this House Majority Caucus ever contemplated doing so,” House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, said.
Two bills to add rape, incest and nonviable pregnancy exceptions to Kentucky’s abortion bans have been filed by Democrats and Republicans this session, but neither have received a committee hearing yet.
This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
