I fully respect antiabortion beliefs. But Kansas pro-life leaders are just plain lying | Opinion

Two things to know at the outset: This column is about abortion. And I hate writing about abortion.

Let me explain the second part first. I am pro-choice because I believe real issues of women’s freedom and health are at stake. The last year since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade has furnished too many horror stories — about doctors refusing care to violently ill pregnant women, of a Texas man who sued his ex-wife’s friends for helping her obtain abortion pills — to believe otherwise.

So why the squeamishness?

Simple. I grew up in a small, conservative Kansas town — and attended a conservative, Christian college — among devoutly religious people who sincerely believe that life begins at conception and that abortion is a murderous act.

I still love those folks. It seems impossible that we’ll ever find a reasonable middle ground on the issue. But I know that despite our disagreement, a lot of them seem honorable, acting on their best understanding of right and wrong.

The problem: Not all leaders and activists in the pro-life political movement act with a firm or honorable regard for the truth.

Which leads us to the news: A group of Kansas abortion providers announced Tuesday that they’re suing the state, challenging the “Women’s Right to Know Act” further regulating abortion. The Legislature passed the requirements updating a long-standing “informed consent” law during this past session, then overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.

“We will not stand by as Kansans’ rights continue to be undermined,” said Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson, “especially after they made their support for abortion access resoundingly clear last summer.”

The lawsuit challenges several parts of the law, but perhaps the most prominent is a new requirement that providers tell patients: “It may be possible to reverse the intended effects of a medication abortion that uses mifepristone, if the woman changes her mind, but that time is of the essence.”

We don’t know whether that assertion is antiabortion fiction, though.

“Claims regarding abortion ‘reversal’ treatment are not based on science and do not meet clinical standards,” the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says in its explainer on the subject, also calling the hormone doses it calls for “unethical.” A 2012 study that forms the basis of these claims studied just six women — four of whom continued their pregnancies — and didn’t include a control group to help judge the results. Another attempted study ended early because of safety concerns.

Which suggests that the Kansas antiabortion legislators who passed the requirement into law can’t really know that the words they are forcing doctors to say to abortion patients are true and accurate. They hope so, which isn’t the same thing. And that makes a mockery of the idea of the “informed” part of “informed consent” in health care.

The truth — rigorous, verifiable fact — has been stretched. And not for the first time.

Who can forget last August, when a firm linked to Kansas’ former U.S. Rep. Tim Huelskamp texted voters with false instructions intended to trick pro-choice voters into voting the anti-abortion-rights stance on the “Value Them Both” state constitutional amendment? That was a clear lie.

Those texts came at the end of a broader campaign in which anti-choice activists worked endlessly to obscure the amendment’s clear antiabortion intent. They aired ads saying talk of bans were a “scare tactic” and claiming the real aim was to preserve the state’s existing abortion regulations. That was misleading, to say the least. The amendment was no defense of the status quo.

Kansans weren’t fooled, though. The amendment failed by a wide margin.

Pro-life folks in Kansas believe themselves to be acting on behalf of a righteous cause. But the methods some of the movement’s leading activists have used over the last year — stretching, bending and sometimes breaking the truth entirely — are anything but righteous.

That’s dishonorable, in fact, and antidemocratic: If you have to fool people into voting for your stance, you haven’t won the argument. You’ve merely executed a successful con.

Forcing doctors to recite unproven medical assertions to their patients during a vulnerable moment? That’s just more of the same.