A pregnant woman in Kentucky seeking an abortion filed a lawsuit on Tuesday asking a court to strike down the state’s abortion bans.
The woman, who is known in court records as Mary Poe and is about seven or eight weeks pregnant, is challenging Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban and the six-week ban simultaneously in effect. These bans, Poe argues, violate the Kentucky constitution’s rights to privacy and self-determination and should not be enforced.
“For many individuals, the bans altogether foreclose the ability to access abortion, thus forcing them to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth, which carries a risk of death up to 14 times higher than that associated with abortion,” the lawsuit alleges. “Others, pushed by the bans to travel out of state for legal care, bear the burdens both of increased health risks from being pushed later into pregnancy and of the cost and logistical difficulties of long-distance travel.”
The lawsuit also requests class-action status for all people who may be pregnant or can become so but are unable to get a abortion in Kentucky.
“I feel overwhelmed and frustrated that I cannot access abortion care here in my own state, and I have started the difficult process of arranging to get care in another state where it’s legal,” Poe said in a statement. “This involves trying to take time off work and securing child care, all of which place an enormous burden on me. This is my personal decision, a decision I believe should be mine alone, not one made by anyone else.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kentucky, and the law firm Kaplan, Johnson, Abate & Bird are representing Poe.
Kentucky is one of more than a dozen states that have banned almost all abortions in the two years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade. It is also one of several states that have overlapping abortion bans on the books – a result of Roe-era efforts by state legislators to pile up abortion restrictions to both score political points with the anti-abortion movement and generate opportunities for the supreme court to take up a challenge to Roe.
Last year, another pregnant Kentucky woman also sued the state over its anti-abortion laws, but she later learned that her embryo was no longer viable. That case was ultimately dismissed.
