TOPEKA, Kansas (LifeSiteNews) – Kansas Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed legislation April 19 to incentivize charitable giving to non-profit pregnancy centers, falsely maligning alternatives to the abortion industry as illegitimate medical resources.
HB 2465 would have increased income tax credits for the costs of adoption as well as established new tax credits for donations to charitable organizations that operate pregnancy centers, and exempt purchases by pregnancy resource centers and residential maternity facilities from sales taxes.
“I do not believe it is appropriate to divert taxpayer dollars to largely unregulated crisis pregnancy centers,” Kelly said in her veto message, NBC affiliate KSNT reported. “These entities are not medical centers and do not promote evidence-based methods to prevent unplanned pregnancies. This bill goes against the wishes of Kansans. On August 2, 2022, Kansas voters overwhelmingly signaled to politicians that they should stop inserting themselves between women and their private medical decisions.”
Kelly was referring to the defeat of a proposed amendment clarifying that the Kansas Constitution did not contain a right to abortion; however, that amendment did not pass judgment on any specific pro-life laws or did it say anything against providing life-affirming options to pregnant women.
“By her heartless veto, Governor Kelly has shown once again that her only allegiance is to the profit-driven abortion industry, and not to vulnerable Kansas women, children, and families. KFL calls on legislators to override the governor’s veto of HB 2465 when they return to Topeka next week,” responded Kansans for Life director of government relations Jeanne Gawdun.
Crisis pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care from qualified professionals, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
Left-wing hostility to crisis pregnancy centers drastically intensified when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, which triggered the activation of numerous state laws that forced scores of Planned Parenthood facilities across the country to shut down. Pregnancy centers became targets of violence, vandalism, and threats; and politicians, including President Joe Biden, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer calling for new limits on their funding, speech rights, and very existence.
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and enshrining abortion “rights” in state constitutions.