On Tuesday, Kansas will decide the nation’s first direct electoral test of abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson—an amendment to the state constitution that could pave the way for a total abortion ban.
to advance the amendment, while a broad coalition of pro-choice organizations is scrambling to stop it, testing a new message tailored to appeal to independents and moderate Republicans. The pitch casts the amendment as an infringement on personal liberties—a government mandate “designed to interfere with private medical decisions.” The front of the flyer that Sykes was tucking into screen doors did not mention abortion.
Women travelled from other states to Kansas to terminate pregnancies. By 1973, when the Supreme Court made abortion legal throughout the country, seventy-five per cent of Kansans believed the decision should be left to a woman alone, or a woman and her doctor. According to the historian Jennifer Donnally, the rate of legal abortions in Kansas far exceeded that in neighboring states.
To supporters of the August 2nd referendum, the 2019 ruling was the work of six “unelected liberal judges appointed by pro-abortion politicians.” A spokesperson for Value Them Both, the umbrella organization advancing the amendment, has said that defeat would mean “an unregulated abortion industry with no limits at all.” The group’s advertisements plead for Kansans to “restore common-sense abortion limits.
The ballot language itself gives no clues about what might follow. “It’s extraordinarily confusing,” Beth Bailey, the history professor, who favors access to abortion, said. “I sat down several months ago and looked at it and, I swear, I would have been confused which way I was supposed to vote.” This is the wording, in full, to which voters are asked to respond yes or or no:
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