Some background on transfer agreements and the dispute and trial

Second in the Amici series

In Kentucky, TAs were signed into law in 1998. Read the law here. It basically states that abortion clinics must have a written agreement with an ambulance service and an acute-care hospital to accept and treat the clinic’s patients who have complications requiring emergency help. NOTE: This law is to save the lives of women AFTER they have exercised their constitutional right to get an abortion.

When Gov. Bevin took office a member of his staff discovered that the Transfer Agreements of Kentucky’s abortion clinics were not lawful. They had been contracted with a department of a hospital and not with the hospital itself. The clinics were given time to correct the oversight. Meanwhile the EMW clinic in Lexington was shuttered by the Bevin administration for its unhealthful environment, even though it did have a TA with U of K Hospital.

When the clinics did not correct their TAs, the state acted to prevent them from providing abortions services but it was ruled that EMW should remain open since it would be the state’s only abortion clinic. PP had only begun to do abortions in its clinic in Louisville.

In the spring of 2017, PP and EMW sued Kentucky to overturn the law requiring TAs. In early September the case went to court and was heard by Judge Greg Stivers who ruled the following September (2018) that the Plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU and others, were in the right. Kentucky was ordered to pay all attorneys’ fees and costs which were $512,384.50 and $22,210.69, respectively, which Judge Stivers found to be reasonable.

Gov. Bevin’s administration appealed the verdict to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals where it currently awaits judgment, as previously noted.