In the final days of the 2025 General Assembly session, lawmakers swiftly overrode gubernatorial vetoes of measures dealing with medically complex pregnancies, gender-affirming care, and therapies meant to reverse the sexual identities of LGBTQ individuals. Advocates for and against these bills appeared on Kentucky Tonight to discuss these legislative actions.
Clarifications to the State’s Abortion Ban
House Bill 90 started as a measure to allow freestanding birthing centers, which would provide labor, delivery, and postpartum services to mothers outside of a traditional hospital. But late in the session, a Senate committee substitute added language meant to help doctors better understand when they could terminate a pregnancy without violating Kentucky’s near-total ban on abortion.
“What was important was to say, ‘This is intentional abortion, this is not,’” says Addia Wuchner, executive director of Kentucky Right to Life and a former state representative. “And making sure there’s not ambiguity in the law when it comes to spontaneous miscarriage, ectopic pregnancies, molar pregnancies, sepsis, (and) hemorrhage so that the doctors have that weight off their shoulders.”
Republican lawmakers worked on the new language with Wuchner and Louisville OB-GYN Dr. Jeffrey Goldberg, who is legislative advocacy chair for the state chapter of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). Even with the addition of the 55-page committee substitute, Wuchner says there are still areas that need further clarification.
“Ambiguity in the law causes confusion, and what we were doing with was trying to remove as much as we could as a start, and that was important in the 30-day session for the maternal health care of the women of the commonwealth,” says Wuchner. “The next step is another conversation.”
But opponents argue the measure will endanger the lives of women even more than the current ban does. Tamarra Wieder, state director for Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, says the final bill is riddled with “anti-abortion jargon” like “fetal maternal separation” rather than medically precise language. She says neither the Kentucky ACOG group nor the national association have endorsed the legislation.
“There are 85 doctors out there who say that does not create a pathway to any form of clarification,” says Wieder. “The goal of this legislation is to divide the public that supports access to reproductive health care, and to deem some people and some conditions more deserving of safe and effective treatment.”
Wuchner says the bill isn’t meant to tell doctors what procedure to perform, but rather clarify the conditions under which they could act without the threat of prosecution. Under the current abortion ban, doctors accused of illegally performing the procedure can be charged with a Class D felony. Opponents including Wieder argue the measure will cause hospitals and doctors to act more cautiously and conservatively in their care decisions, and result in more cesarean sections and inductions of labor.
“These are taking the ability of doctors to use their good-faith judgment in moments of emergencies and are giving it over to the judges to decide,” says Wieder. “They need to leave it in the good-faith, which gives more power to the provider to defend their (patient’s) needs.”
The final legislation did not address exceptions to the state’s abortion ban for victims of rape or incest. Wieder says women in those situations need a pathway to abortion care, while Wuchner says every life has dignity and Kentucky Right to Life isn’t interested in allowing exemption to the abortion ban.
Gender Affirming Health Care and Conversion Therapy
Lawmakers also overrode Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of House Bill 495, which reverses his 2024 executive order to ban the practice known as conversion therapy. Republican leaders and supporters of the measure argue that was a policy decision that should’ve been made by the legislature.
“The governor’s counseling ban was a one-sided action,” says David Walls, executive director of The Family Foundation. “It suppresses free speech, it tramples religious freedom, and it tramples the rights of parents to seek out the counseling that they desire for their children.”
Conversion therapy is a practice that seeks to reverse the sexual preferences or gender identities of LGBTQ individuals. Opponents say it damages the mental health of youth who undergo the therapy and that Beshear was simply trying to protect children from the controversial practice.
“We know it’s medical malpractice,” says Fairness Campaign Executive Director Chris Hartman. “Children who are subjected to it are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide.”
HB 495 also received a late committee substitute that prohibits the state’s Medicaid program from paying for gender-reassignment surgeries or hormone therapies.
Medicaid has never covered such surgeries, according to Lexington-Fayette Urban County Councilmember Emma Curtis. But she says Medicaid has covered hormone therapy, which she says is a treatment accepted by major medical organizations around the world. She adds that laws like HB 495 strip marginalized Kentuckians of health care.
“I’m sitting before you as a transgender Kentuckian,” says Curtis. “You have your right to believe whatever you might want to believe about me, but you don’t have the right to take away my access to the health care that saves my life and saves thousands of other lives because you don’t understand me.”
Hartman says most Kentuckians don’t care about this issue, and lawmakers only pursue it because it’s “political red meat” that generates outrage, votes, and campaign contributions. Supporters say Kentuckians shouldn’t be forced to cover the costs of changing a person’s gender, something that they contend isn’t possible.
“We’re talking about taxpayer money going for procedures and treatments that will... result in the long-term irreversible damage to these individuals,” says Colin Smothers of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and an adjunct professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. “It’s God who assigns male and female, and who are we to act otherwise?”
A separate measure, Senate Bill 2, says that public dollars cannot be used to pay for gender-affirming care for inmates at county jails or state prisons, which had been allowed under an administrative regulation issued by the Beshear administration. Smothers says this is another issue that the legislature should decide, not a unilateral decision for the governor to make. He says taxpayers do not want to fund these kinds of surgeries or therapies.
Hartman says all inmates deserve access to medical services, and the state could face legal challenges for denying professionally prescribed health care to inmates. Opponents also say that ceasing hormone therapy without a proper tapering-off period can be medically harmful to the patient.
Gov. Beshear did not veto SB 2 but allowed the measure to become law without his signature.
