In the first test at the polls since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion is on the ballot in Kansas.
On August 2 in Kansas, abortion rights is facing the first test at the polls since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
In 2019, Kansas’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution protects the right to an abortion. Now voters are asked to weigh in on a proposed amendment that would explicitly remove that right, opening the way for Kansas’s Republican-controlled legislature to further restrict or ban abortion, just as neighboring Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri have done.
The other elections taking place Tuesday are the state’s Democratic and Republican primaries, although registered independents — who compose 29 percent of Kansas’s electorate — may also vote on the abortion amendment. The timing is intentional: Republican lawmakers placed the measure on the August primary ballot instead of into the November general election in hopes that turnout remains low. Republicans outnumber Democrats in the state roughly two to one.
Four other states will vote on abortion-related ballot measures later this year, all in November. In Kansas, millions of dollars are pouring in from supporters and opponents of the amendment, and the outcome is being closely watched nationwide as a potential signal of how energized voters are about abortion rights.
The outcome will also have major implications not only for Kansas residents but also for women from across the region who depend on Kansas for reproductive care as their own states shut down abortion access. The Guttmacher Institute predicts Kansas could see a more than 1,000 percent increase in abortions in the post-Roe era as neighboring states outlaw the procedure.The amendment’s passage would make it easy to ban abortion outright in Kansas
You’d be forgiven if you had trouble making sense of the amendment’s text, which would add a paragraph to the state’s constitution that says both “Kansas does not require government funding of abortion” and that people, through their elected officials, “may pass laws regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.”
The language could trip up your average voter, said Neal Allen, a political scientist at Wichita State University. “You could read it and think you were voting to eliminate state funding of abortion when there is no state funding to abortion,” he told Vox. “And there is language that refers to exceptions to preserve the health of the mother, and for rape and incest, but there’s nothing about the amendment itself that would create those exceptions.”
Supporters of the amendment, organizing under the banner of “Value Them Both” — a reference to valuing “women and unborn children” — have been working to convince voters that a “yes” vote on the amendment would not lead to an abortion ban and would simply allow lawmakers to regulate the procedure.
Many of their claims have been dubious at best, and have generated significant confusion. Value Them Both supporters have stressed in their advertisements that the amendment “restores our ability to place basic regulations on the abortion industry.” In fact, abortion remains highly regulated in Kansas. They say the amendment would merely allow lawmakers to impose rules like requiring parental consent, “stopping painful late-term abortions,” and barring public funding of abortion. But Kansas already requires parental consent, already bans public funding of abortion, and already bans abortion after 22 weeks.
If the amendment passes, nothing could stop Republican lawmakers from passing a total or near-total abortion ban, and political experts say the likelihood of such restrictions moving forward in that context is very high.
