Lawsuit filed against Kansas law nullifying end-of-life choices for pregnant women

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.

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."

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."

"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.