Jessica Kalb has been waiting over three years for a court to decide if Kentucky law, including its ban on abortion, violates her religious freedom and puts her at risk of criminal prosecution if, as a patient pursuing in vitro fertilization, she eventually discards any frozen embryos that she doesn’t need.
Kalb launched this lawsuit when she was 32 years old, just a few months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban – outlawing abortion except in life-threatening cases – to take effect.
Now, Kalb is 35. At that age, pregnancies are considered higher-risk.
“We were trying to get all of this done before that milestone,” she said. “Because with geriatric pregnancies, there's a lot more risk.”
This is just one of many lawsuits challenging state-level abortion bans that have been fought across the country since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the national right to an abortion. Kalb originally filed her lawsuit alongside two other Jewish women, but ultimately the Kentucky Court of Appeals decided that she was the only one with the necessary legal standing to sue.
In a courtroom Monday, Kalb’s attorney, Aaron Kemper, argued that Kentucky law is “vague and unintelligible” concerning the legality of discarding frozen embryos from IVF in a state where human life is legally defined, in multiple statutes, as including embryos.
Read the rest at LPM News.
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