JEFF COLYER, NEW GOVERNOR OF KANSAS DECLARES IN ADDRESS BEFORE LEGISLATURE: “EVERYONE HAS A GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO LIFE”

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

 TOPEKA, Kan. — The new governor of the state of Kansas delivered his first 

address to a joint session of the legislature on Wednesday, a speech that 

included a declaration that everyone has a God-given right to life.

Jeff Colyer, who previously served as lieutenant governor, was sworn
in as governor on Jan. 31 after Gov. Sam Brownback accepted a position
to serve as the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious
Freedom. Both Colyer and Brownback identify as Roman Catholic and both
have spoken about their pro-life views publicly.

“Kansas was founded on the ideal that all people have value,” Colyer,
a surgeon in Johnson County, told those gathered for the address this
week. “Everyone has a God-given right to life and liberty.”

“And as a doctor, I’ve seen newborn babies who no one gave a chance
thrive. I’ve seen mothers frightened by a scary ultrasound only to
rejoice at their child’s wedding 20 years later,” he noted.

Colyer outlined that Kansas has historically opposed abortion.

“When Kansas first entered the Union, two of our first laws
emphasized basic human dignity. As a free state, Kansas prohibited
slavery, and the same founders whose names appear on these walls, they
passed laws prohibiting abortion,” he explained. “That same constitution
that prohibited slavery did not mention a right to an abortion.”

Colyer consequently lamented a 2016 ruling in which the Kansas Court
of Appeals—in a tie vote—stuck down the state’s ban on dismemberment
abortions, with half finding a right to an abortion in the Kansas
Constitution and the other half opining that there is no such right in
the state’s founding documents.

As previously reported,
SB 95, passed in 2015, banned the common second trimester practice of
“dismembering a living unborn child and extracting such unborn child one
piece at a time from the uterus through the use of clamps, grasping
forceps, tongs, scissors or similar instruments that, through the
convergence of two rigid levers, slice, crush or grasp a portion of the
unborn child’s body in order to cut or rip it off.”

However, the bill specifically noted that it did not ban “an abortion
which uses suction to dismember the body of the unborn child by sucking
fetal parts into a collection container,” also known as vacuum
aspiration abortions, which are common throughout the first trimester.

Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks placed an injunction on
the dismemberment ban in June 2015, opining that a mother’s
“fundamental right to terminate a pregnancy [would] be unduly burdened”
if the law was allowed to stand. The ruling was appealed, and because
the appeals court ruling was a tie, Hendricks’ ruling was left
undisturbed.

“[A] Kansas court issued a ruling which argues that the framers of
the Kansas Constitution imagined abortion as a separate constitutional
state right. This is violence against the very basic facts, and this
cannot stand,” Colyer declared on Wednesday, drawing a standing ovation
from some in attendance.

The Lawrence Journal-World reports that the Republicans present stood to their feet in support, while Democrats sat still.

“We are a pro-life state, and on the issue of life, the stakes are so
high. The issue is so foundational. The people of Kansas must have the
final say,” he said.

View the speech in full here. Colyer’s remarks on abortion begin at approximately 19:30 into the recording.

The Kansas Supreme Court is currently considering an appeal of the
cited ruling, and lawmakers are also pondering the possibility of
introducing a constitutional amendment should the high court find that
state founders established a right to an abortion.

“A constitutional amendment … would just take this question out of
the hands of unelected judges in the future,” Rep. Chuck Weber,
R-Wichita, told local radio station KCUR. “It would really reflect the
will of the people.”

As previously reported,
the state’s ban on dilation and evacuation abortions had
been challenged by abortionist Herbert Hodes and his daughter, Traci
Nauser, who argued that it placed a burden on their “right” to perform
second trimester abortions. In court, the state presented other options
for ending the lives of the unborn.

“The state has offered three alternatives to the standard D & E
procedure: labor-induced abortion, inducing fetal demise with digoxin
injections, and inducing fetal demise by cutting the umbilical cord
(also known as transection),” the appeals court outlined in April 2016.

However, some believe that abortion, like slavery, should be
abolished altogether—just as Christians have declared in America
for more than 200 years.

Philadelphia legal writer, educator and Christian apologist Francis
Wharton penned an entire chapter on abortion in his 1855 book “American
Criminal Law.”

Wharton called abortionists “persons who are ready to degrade their
humanity to this occupation” and stated in regard to abortion in
general, “Such conduct cannot be too strongly condemned, and is the more
deserving of receiving the punishment awarded for the criminal offense
in question.”

In an introductory lecture to his course on obstetrics in 1854, Dr.
Hugh Lennox Hodge likewise explained that if a woman were to come to a
medical doctor in pursuit of an abortion, “he must, as it were, grasp
the conscience of his weak and erring patient and let her know in
language not to be misunderstood that she is responsible to her Creator
for the life of the being within her.”

“The procuring abortion is ‘a base and unmanly act,’” Hodge also
said, quoting in part text from a court ruling of his day. “It is a
crime against the natural feelings of man, against the welfare and
safety of females, against the peace and prosperity of society, against
the divine command ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is murder.”
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SEE OUR PREVIOUS POSTS ABOUT BROWNBACK:
https://ratherexposethem.org/2018/02/state-department-embraces-islamic.html 
https://ratherexposethem.org/2016/05/planned-parenthood-sues-kansas-for.html 
https://ratherexposethem.org/2016/05/kansas-defies-obama-on-syrian-refugees.html