Lawyers defending Kansas laws that imposed restrictions on abortion care accused the judge who struck down those restrictions of discriminating against anti-abortion witnesses for their religious beliefs.
The accusation was one piece of attorneys’ argument to reopen, retry and dismiss a case that resulted in state-mandated restrictions on abortion care being voided earlier this year.
Attorneys for state and county officials made the argument at a hearing Tuesday in Johnson County Court before a new judge, Stephanie Goodenow, who will deliver a written decision on whether to reopen the case.
A group of abortion providers sued officials in 2023 for abortion restrictions that date to the 1990s. Aftera seven-day bench trial in October 2025, then-Johnson County District Judge Christopher Jayaram, who is now a Kansas Supreme Court justice, issued an 260-page opinion in August that foundthe restrictions violated Kansans’ right to bodily autonomy.
At the time, anti-abortion advocates criticized the decision for its content and its timing. Jayaram issued the opinion just hours before he was sworn in as a state Supreme Court justice. State and county officials appealed the decision almost immediately.
Lincoln Wilson, a partner at the Colorado-based firm First and Fourteenth who argued on behalf of state and county officials, called Jayaram’s decision “one-sided,” and said there was “religious discrimination and animus” in his findings.
Jayaram gave little to no weight to each of the state’s seven witnesses, pointing, in some cases, to the witnesses’ “personal or spiritual beliefs.”
Wilson likened Jayaram’s findings to a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision in a Colorado case involving a cake shop owner who declined to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple on the basis of his religious beliefs. The U.S. Supreme Court found that state officials were hostile toward the owner’s religious beliefs when the couple filed a civil rights complaint.
Wilson also said Jayaram’s findings were analogous to racial discrimination.
When Goodenow pressed Wilson, asking him to confirm whether he thought the Kansas and Colorado cases were the same, Wilson said there were “enough ingredients here” that are like the Colorado case.
Alice Wang, an attorney for Kansas abortion providers from the New York-based group the Center for Reproductive Rights, said the state’s accusation of religious bias mischaracterized the trial and Jayaram’s judgment.
“The state had its day in court,” Wang said. “It can and has appealed the result, but it has offered no basis for this court to reopen its own judgment, much less dismiss the case.”
The state laws, which included the Women’s Right to Know Act, that were challenged and voided contained several requirements for abortion providers that plaintiffs argued at trial were harmful to patients.
Under state law, patients were subject to 24-hour waiting periods. Providers had to disclose state-sanctioned anti-abortion language, including false claims that abortion poses a risk to future pregnancies and increases the risk of breast cancer. Physicians had to present the information in a specific typeface, font size and color. Patients had to wait another 30 minutes after meeting with their provider before they could receive abortion care. Providers had to tell patients at least five times that medication abortions can be reversed, a method that is regarded by some as an experimental and potentially dangerous treatment. Physicians had to ask patients the most important factor they considered when deciding to obtain an abortion.
Jayaram temporarily blocked those restrictions in 2023, and his August decision made the block permanent.
Wilson challenged whether the abortion providers who brought the case should have been able to sue in the interest of their patients in the first place. He said they have a conflict of interest, which warrants reopening the case.
“If you are invoking someone else’s rights, you have to be aligned with their interests,” Wilson said, “and what we have here is a fundamental conflict because the Women’s Right to Know Act gives patients the right to sue their abortion provider if requirements are not met.”
At the close of Tuesday’s hearing, Goodenow noted the case includes almost 750 pleadings over more than three years. The social and political battles over abortion have gone on for much longer.
Jayaram’s decision was an affirmation of the right to an abortion in Kansas, which came after voters rejected a 2022 constitutional amendment that could’ve led to further restrictions and a 2019 state Supreme Court decision that cemented Kansans’ right to bodily autonomy.
Whether Goodenow decides to reopen the case and allow a retrial isn’t determinative of the case’s outcome.
This story was originally published by the Kansas Reflector.
