Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday told allies in the Indo-Pacific that the U.S. has their back against increasing military and economic pressure from China, while insisting that they also contribute more to their own defense.

Hegseth said the U.S. will bolster its defenses overseas to counter what the Pentagon views as rapidly developing threats by China, particularly toward Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own. China has conducted numerous exercises to test what a blockade of the island would look like.

The Chinese army "is rehearsing for the real deal," Hegseth said in a keynote speech at a security conference in Singapore. "We are not going to sugarcoat it — the threat China poses is real. And it could be imminent."

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China has said it wants its military to be in a position to take Taiwan by force if necessary by 2027.

China is no longer building up its military forces to take Taiwan, but it is "actively training for it, every day," Hegseth said on Saturday.

Not only has China created man-made islands in the South China Sea to support new military outposts, but it has also developed highly advanced hypersonic and space capabilities, prompting the U.S. to begin creating the "Golden Dome."

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In his speech, Hegseth called out China's ambitions in Latin America, specifically attempts to increase influence over the Panama Canal.

He also urged countries in the region to increase their defense spending to be in line with the percentage of gross domestic product that European nations are being pressed to contribute.

"We must all do our part," Hegseth said.

The European Union's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, pushed back against Hegseth after his speech for a comment he made about European countries putting focus on defending their own region while the U.S. mostly handles the Indo-Pacific.

Kallas said European and Asian security are "very much interlinked" at the moment as North Korean troops are fighting for Russia and China is supporting Moscow.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Three women and two physicians are suing to block a Kansas law that invalidates a pregnant woman's advance medical directive about end-of-life treatment.

The plaintiffs — one of whom is currently pregnant — are challenging the constitutionality of a clause in the state’s Natural Death Act that denies pregnant women the option to make advance directives to accept or refuse healthcare if they become incapacitated or terminally ill.

Patient plaintiffs Emma Vernon, Abigail Ottaway and Laura Stratton and physician plaintiffs Michele Bennett and Lynley Holman filed the lawsuit on Thursday. It argues that the clause violates the right to personal autonomy, privacy, equal treatment and freedom of speech by ignoring the end-of-life decisions of pregnant women.

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Vernon, the pregnant plaintiff, wrote an advance healthcare directive stating that, if pregnant and diagnosed with a terminal condition, she would only like to receive life-sustaining treatment if "there is a reasonable medical certainty" that her child would reach full term and be born "with a meaningful prospect of sustained life and without significant conditions that would substantially impair its quality of life."

The lawsuit says her directive has not been "given the same deference the law affords to others who complete directives because of the Pregnancy Exclusion, and therefore she does not benefit from the same level of certainty that the directive otherwise provides."

All states have laws allowing people to write advance directives on the medical care they would like to receive if they become unable to make their own health decisions. Nine states, including Kansas, have clauses to invalidate a pregnant woman's advance directive.

The physicians who joined the lawsuit said the law requires them to provide pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than other patients and opens them up to civil and criminal lawsuits as well as professional penalties.

The lawsuit says the doctors "are deeply committed to the foundational medical principle that patients have a fundamental right to determine what treatment they receive, and that providing treatment without a patient’s informed consent violates both medical ethics and the law."

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"Yet Kansas law compels them to disregard their patients’ clearly expressed end-of-life decisions, forcing them to provide their pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than any of their other patients receive," it continues. "It demands this diminished care without offering any clarity on what end-of-life treatment they are required to provide—leaving them to guess at what the law expects while exposing them to civil, criminal, and professional consequences for getting it wrong."

The defendants in the lawsuit are Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, Kansas State Board of Healing Arts President Richard Bradbury and Douglas County District Attorney Dakota Loomis.