Low-income women in and around Dodge City soon may be denied basic health care services thanks to a new Kansas law.

The law passed earlier this year says that Title X federal family planning funds must be distributed first to public health departments and hospitals. The result is that, after the law went into effect on July 1, no funds were available for clinics like the Dodge City Family Planning Clinic and Planned Parenthood clinics in Wichita and Hays. Planned Parenthood has filed a lawsuit challenging the law, and a federal district judge in Wichita ordered the state to continue distributing Title X funds to the Planned Parenthood clinics while the litigation is pending.

However, state officials continue to deny Title X funds to the Dodge City clinic, which was not a party to the lawsuit. Last week, the clinic asked the Wichita judge to include it in the ongoing Planned Parenthood litigation and to order the state to release funding for the clinic.

In the meantime, the Dodge City clinic has lost more than 60 percent of its funding. Its employees continue to provide services but they haven’t been paid since sometime in July. Obviously, that situation can’t continue indefinitely. Without some financial relief, the Dodge City clinic will be forced to close, leaving about 650 low-income patients in southwest Kansas without access to a variety of health services including birth control, cancer screenings, pregnancy testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. According to the new law, the Ford County health department would be eligible to obtain Title X funds that offset the cost of delivering these services, but the director of the family planning clinic said she had contacted the health department and was told it wasn’t interested in taking over the Title X funding or the services.

The Dodge City Family Planning Clinic has been using Title X dollars to provide health services to low-income residents for 35 years. It has never provided abortion services. If, as the current Planned Parenthood lawsuit claims, the new state law is aimed at eliminating abortion in Kansas, depriving clinics like the one in Dodge City of funding is counterproductive. Reducing access to birth control will certainly result in an increase in unplanned pregnancies. Reducing important health services like Pap tests and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases isn’t an attack on abortion; it’s an attack on women who can’t afford to pay for those services at a clinic that isn’t subsidized by Title X funding.

The courts already have ordered the state to continue funding for the Planned Parenthood clinics while the pending lawsuits are making their way through the courts. Why must state officials force the Dodge City clinic to launch its own legal fight to obtain the same consideration? Health services for low-income women shouldn’t be tolerated as “collateral damage” in Kansas officials’ battle against abortion.