LOUISVILLE, Ky. (KT) – March and April 2023 saw five lives lost to abortion in Kentucky.
All abortions were performed under the enforcement of Kentucky’s trigger abortion ban. Under that law, abortions are permitted to protect the life and health of the mother. The exception allows physicians to perform an abortion if he or she decides, within “reasonable medical judgment,” that the abortion is necessary to prevent death, a substantial risk of death or serious damage to a life-sustaining organ of the pregnant woman.
In March, four abortions were provided to three women, all of whom were unmarried Kentucky residents.
The Cabinet for Health and Family Services noted two abortions performed on one woman on the same day in late March. Those drug-induced abortions, represented in one row of data but counted as two procedures, were performed at 17-weeks gestation.
The other two abortions in March occurred at 18- and 19-weeks gestation, respectively. The termination procedure reported for the former abortion is listed as “induction of labor” with the latter abortion being drug induced.
One abortion was performed in April — a drug-induced termination using Cytotec, the name brand version of misoprostol, the second drug in the two-step regimen commonly referred to as medical, or chemical, abortion. The fetus was aborted at 17-weeks gestation; the mother was an unmarried resident of Kentucky.
Unlike previous records released to Kentucky Today when abortion was legal in the commonwealth, the Cabinet did not provide the following data: age, race or Hispanic origin of the pregnant women, the facility where the abortions were performed, previous live births or other terminations. Those data points have not been issued by the Cabinet since July 2022.
All data related to abortions provided in Kentucky are made available to the public through the Open Records Act.
Friends of Life KY 