By Sarah Ladd, Kentucky Lantern · May 13, 2026

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman is appealing a Louisville judge’s ruling that the state’s definition of human life is void because it’s too vague. 

Lawyers who sued on behalf of three Jewish women (only one, Jessica Kalb, was allowed to proceed) who said the abortion ban restricted their ability to pursue in vitro fertilization also filed an appeal in the case. 

This comes less than a month after Jefferson Circuit Judge Brian Edwards struck down the part of Kentucky law that defines a human as “an individual living member of the species homo sapiens throughout the entire embryonic and fetal stages of the unborn child from fertilization to full gestation and childbirth.” 

Edwards’ ruling came in response to pleas from Jewish women who said they couldn’t freely pursue in vitro fertilization if unused embryos were considered human beings. The IVF process routinely involves discarding unused embryos, which are expensive to store. 

The judge also said Kentucky’s abortion ban is religiously neutral. The women have long argued that Kentucky’s laws around abortion have imposed and codified a religious viewpoint that aligns with the Christian faith and conflicts with the Jewish belief that birth, not conception, is the beginning of life. 

Edwards did not agree, saying that the Human Life Protection Act doesn’t burden the Jewish community “any more than it burdens followers of Christianity, Islam or Hindu from exercising their religious beliefs.” 

Both the attorney general and Aaron Kemper and Benjamin Potash, lawyers for the women who sued the state, believe the judge didn’t fully apply the law correctly in his decision. 

In Coleman’s May 11 appeal, he said it was “a manifest error of law” for the court to strike Kentucky’s definition of human life in this case. The state’s “prohibition of abortions does not apply to IVF, including to the disposal of unused embryos.” 

He also said any idea that the state’s abortion ban could be used to prosecute a person going through IVF “is a gross over-reading of the Human Life Protection Act.” 

KY judge strikes definition of human life, paving way for Jewish women’s IVF pursuit

“There is … no basis to conclude that the definition of ‘unborn human being’ … could ever be used as a basis for a homicide prosecution against Ms. Kalb,” Coleman wrote. 

Kemper and Potash want a ruling that acknowledges their freedom of religion concerns.  

The Human Life Protection Act (the state’s abortion law), they wrote, “forces (Kalb) to plan her family under a statutory definition of ‘human being,’ that her sincerely held Jewish faith expressly rejects. Jewish law teaches that life begins at birth, not at conception, and that the life and health of the mother take priority over the developing fetus.”  

Kentucky law “provides no exception for the mother’s mental health, for a lethal fetal anomaly that will not survive birth, rape, incest or for serious but non-life-threatening risks to the mother, all of which Jewish law accommodates and in some circumstances requires,” the lawyers wrote. 

It “thus compels (Kalb) to govern her religiously commanded family planning by a doctrine her faith rejects, on terms her faith forbids.”