Three women and two physicians are suing to block a Kansas law that invalidates a pregnant woman’s advance medical directive about end-of-life treatment.
The plaintiffs — one of whom is currently pregnant — are challenging the constitutionality of a clause in the state’s Natural Death Act that denies pregnant women the option to make advance directives to accept or refuse healthcare if they become incapacitated or terminally ill.
Patient plaintiffs Emma Vernon, Abigail Ottaway and Laura Stratton and physician plaintiffs Michele Bennett and Lynley Holman filed the lawsuit on Thursday. It argues that the clause violates the right to personal autonomy, privacy, equal treatment and freedom of speech by ignoring the end-of-life decisions of pregnant women.
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Vernon, the pregnant plaintiff, wrote an advance healthcare directive stating that, if pregnant and diagnosed with a terminal condition, she would only like to receive life-sustaining treatment if “there is a reasonable medical certainty” that her child would reach full term and be born “with a meaningful prospect of sustained life and without significant conditions that would substantially impair its quality of life.”
The lawsuit says her directive has not been “given the same deference the law affords to others who complete directives because of the Pregnancy Exclusion, and therefore she does not benefit from the same level of certainty that the directive otherwise provides.”
All states have laws allowing people to write advance directives on the medical care they would like to receive if they become unable to make their own health decisions. Nine states, including Kansas, have clauses to invalidate a pregnant woman’s advance directive.
The physicians who joined the lawsuit said the law requires them to provide pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than other patients and opens them up to civil and criminal lawsuits as well as professional penalties.
The lawsuit says the doctors “are deeply committed to the foundational medical principle that patients have a fundamental right to determine what treatment they receive, and that providing treatment without a patient’s informed consent violates both medical ethics and the law.”
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“Yet Kansas law compels them to disregard their patients’ clearly expressed end-of-life decisions, forcing them to provide their pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than any of their other patients receive,” it continues. “It demands this diminished care without offering any clarity on what end-of-life treatment they are required to provide—leaving them to guess at what the law expects while exposing them to civil, criminal, and professional consequences for getting it wrong.”
The defendants in the lawsuit are Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, Kansas State Board of Healing Arts President Richard Bradbury and Douglas County District Attorney Dakota Loomis.
