By Dave Andrusko
A bill passed in the Kansas Senate Thursday that would forbid the use of telemedicine to prescribe the abortion pill. The vote on Senate Bill 5, which “would prohibit the prescribing of drugs intended to cause an abortion” via telemedicine passed with a supermajority—27-12. “The bill also restricts the governor’s power to alter such laws during a state of emergency,” Rebekah Chung of KSNY reported.
The bill now moves to the Kansas House of Representatives.
Senator Mark Steffen, who introduced the bill, “stated the objective of the bill is to clarify terminology in the Kansas Telemedicine Act to prohibit the use of telemedicine to prescribe drugs intended to cause an abortion.”
On December 20, “Planned Parenthood Great Plains said it began offering telemedicine consultations Monday to patients visiting its Wichita clinic,” John Hanna reported.
She said her affiliate hopes to offer the service to patients visiting its other two clinics on the Kansas side of the Kansas City area “in short order” and eventually to allow patients in doctors’ offices and clinics across the state to teleconference with its physicians.
Last November Judge Teresa Watson granted the Trust Women Foundation abortion clinic an injunction of the state’s Telemedicine Act, which prohibited doctors from prescribing abortion pills remotely via telemedicine.
Kansans for Life, the NRLC state affiliate, “responded to what it called Planned Parenthood’s ‘dark announcement’ by promising to consider ‘every possible course of action,’ including legislation.”