State legislators in Kansas are considering a bill that would allow the quarantine of people with AIDS or HIV.

Kansas House Bill 2183 was originally created to serve first responders who might be at risk of contracting HIV through their work. But the Kansas Department of Health and Environment rewrote the language in the bill, broadly deregulating when isolation can take place and opening up the possibility that HIV positive people could be quarantined.

Activists fear this oversight could be used to openly discriminate.

“Our state’s health department is willing to roll back a 25-year old civil rights protection,” Thomas Witt, the Executive Director of the Kansas Equality Coalition, told ThinkProgress. “LGBT Kansans are already subject to harassment and legal discrimination, and removing the existing HIV quarantine exemption from law leaves vulnerable Kansans at risk of discriminatory, unfair treatment by local officials.”

Other activists have also expressed concern that Kansans might not understand how HIV can be spread, and have implicit biases thanks to a lack of knowledge. “We live in a very conservative state and I’m afraid there are still many people, especially in rural Kansas, that have inadequate education and understanding concerning HIV/AIDS,” Cody Patton, of sexual health group Positive Directions told Gay Star News. This theory was also evidenced by a debate earlier this year, when the Kansas health department eliminated HIV testing for most counties in the state.

The Kansas senate has approved the HIV quarantine bill, and it looks likely to pass. During a hearing about the measure on Wednesday, however, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment said it would be willing to work with groups to fix what they considered problematic aspects of current proposal.

Women in Kansas may be the latest group to fall victim to the newest troubling trend in anti-choice legislation: Fetal heartbeat bills. These proposals seek to ban abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks — before many women even know they’re pregnant — and directly undermine the rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, which grants women’s right to an abortion until the point of viability at around 23 or 24 weeks of pregnancy.

The Kansas fetal heartbeat proposal, HB 2324, was introduced earlier in the legislative season, but had not seen much movement until today when the House Federal and State Affairs Committee announced it would conduct a hearing on the bill at 8:00 am tomorrow, hoping to rush the bill through in the final days of the session. Kansas NOW Lobbyist and State Co-Coordinator Elise Higgins expressed dismay at the tactic:

“Not only is House Bill 2324 clearly a way for Kansas legislators to challenge Roe on the taxpayer dime, notice of the hearing was given less than 24 hours in advance to the general public. We condemn this underhanded approach to legislation unprecedented in its extremity, and are committed to fighting it every step of the way.”

North Dakota passed a heartbeat bill earlier in March that is currently awaiting the governor’s signature, while Arkansas overrode a gubernatorial veto to implement a 12-week heartbeat bill that would ban all abortions after the heartbeat could be detected with an abdominal ultrasound. Mark Gietzen, the chairman of the Kansas Coalition for Life, the group behind HB 2324, boasted that the bill was more restrictive than the Arkansas law and claimed it was “likely to stand up in court” in an op-ed over the weekend.

The Kansas House has already advanced a 70-page omnibus anti-abortion bill that does everything from force doctors to warn about unsupported connections between breast cancer and abortions to restricting comprehensive sex ed resources in public schools.

Not to be outdone by states like North Dakota and Arkansas that have recently passed record-breaking abortion restrictions, Republicans in Kansas are advancing a stringent anti-abortion bill that combines several attacks on reproductive rights into one omnibus measure.

HB 2253 is a 70-page piece of legislation that failed last session, when the Senate was more moderate — but since anti-choice state lawmakers won big victories in the 2012 election, Kansas’ abortion opponents are seizing the opportunity to push it through this year. The House approved the bill by a 92-31 vote on Wednesday afternoon, and it’s also expected to pass in the GOP-controlled Senate, where Republican leaders have promised to “consider the bill quickly.” Republican Gov. Sam Brownback has promised to sign any anti-abortion legislation that reaches his desk.

If the massive bill were to be enacted into law, here’s how HB 2253 would compromise the reproductive rights of the women living in Kansas:

1. Threatens to outlaw all abortions by redefining life in the state Constitution. HB 2253 includes a personhood clause that would define life as beginning at fertilization in Kansas’ Constitution. Women’s health groups call that a “personhood trigger” because, if the Supreme Court ever left abortion rights completely up to the states, it would ensure that abortion would be totally outlawed in Kansas.

2. Instates costly taxes on abortion services and abortion providers. Several provisions in the bill hope to limit abortion by making it more expensive. Under HB 2253, women who get abortions would not be able to deduct the medical procedure as a health care expense on their taxes. Since Kansas law already prevents women from using their own insurance plans to cover abortion services — requiring them to purchase an additional rider — the extra tax provisions would even further complicate reproductive health care in the state. And according to Planned Parenthood officials, enforcing the abortion deduction ban could end up violating medical privacy laws by allowing state auditors to demand access to individuals’ medical records. The bill would also target groups affiliated with abortion providers by preventing them from receiving the same tax breaks that other organizations do.

3. Requires doctors to give women biased information about the dangers of having an abortion. Under the omnibus bill, doctors would be required to provide women with disputed information about abortion risks. Of course, every patient undergoing a medical procedure should be fully educated about the risks — but these kind of “informed consent” sessions are a popular anti-choice tactic specifically designed to dissuade women from terminating a pregnancy. Doctors would need to tell women about a potential link between abortion and breast cancer, even though medical experts don’t believe there’s a connection between the two.

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The Kansas Senate Judiciary Committee recommended a bill yesterday that would effectively allow doctors to lie or withhold information about debilitating genetic conditions or birth defects in order to influence women’s decisions about their pregnancies.

Kansas SB 142 provides blanket protection from “wrongful birth” lawsuits to doctors, with section 1(a) reading:

“No civil action may be commenced in any court for a claim of wrongful life or wrongful birth, and no damages may be recovered in any civil action for any physical condition of a minor that existed at the time of such minor’s birth if the damages sought arise out of a claim that a person’s action or omission contributed to such minor’s mother not obtaining an abortion.”

The Arizona State Senate passed a similar law in 2012, but that proposal contained a provision absent from the Kansas bill allowing wrongful birth suits in the event of “an intentional or grossly negligent act or omission.”

The proposal was included as a provision in an omnibus anti-abortion bill last year, but was so controversial that it ending up being submitted as a standalone bill in this cycle, according to Kansas NOW lobbyist Elise Higgins. Despite Kansas’s dismal reproductive rights record, Kansas legislators have already introduced over 90 pages of anti-choice legislation in 2013.

After Dr. George Tiller was murdered in 2009, his Wichita-area abortion clinic closed its doors — and ever since, women in the area have had no choice but to travel up to 200 miles to get to the nearest clinic. Now, women’s health advocate Julie Burkhart wants to change that.

But that decision isn’t without its risks. There is perhaps no greatest symbol of the dangers of anti-abortion harassment than Dr. Tiller, who was gunned down simply for providing Kansas women with reproductive services — and that type of violence hasn’t dissipated in the years since his death. As Burkhart works to re-open Tiller’s former clinic as the South Wind Women’s Center, security is one of her top concerns:

Safety and security have played significant roles in the decision to reopen this clinic and provide abortion services in Wichita for the first time since the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009.

“We will have a security company working for us after we open. We also have other security measures in place, just the typical things that businesses have these days,” say Burkhart. She is reluctant to provide to many details because of concern about possible threats from anti-abortion activists in the community.

Burkhart says during the long process of reopening the clinic she’s been scared at times. In recent weeks demonstrators have twice camped outside her home. She says her passion helping women make their own reproductive health decision outweighs any fear.

Anti-abortion groups are already doing their best to block Burkhart’s group from opening the clinic, attempting to delay construction by complaining to city officials that the building’s zoning contracts weren’t issued correctly. Some of the contractors working on the building have already been harassed. The site of the clinic, as well as Burkhart’s own home, have been picketed by abortion opponents.

And Burkhart has struggled to find abortion doctors who will agree to relocate to Kansas to put themselves in the middle of the fight. In areas like Wichita, where there are already tight abortion restrictions and a lack of women’s health resources, abortion doctors often aren’t willing to wade into a hostile environment to provide reproductive care. Rising levels of anti-abortion harassment, as well as increasing numbers of restrictions placed on abortion doctors that aren’t required for other types of medical professionals, have contributed to a problematic abortion provider shortage across the country.

Nonetheless, Burkhart is committed to finding a way to open the South Wind Women’s Center sometime this spring. Women have already been calling the clinic to ask when they can schedule appointments, and Burkhart — who used to think she would “never want to step foot back in the state of Kansas again” after her colleague Dr. Tiller was killed — is ready to take a risk to ensure those women get the care they need.