Jul 24, 2022 at 7:13 PM EDT
From left, Sheila Gregory, Cariann Dureka and Emily Daniel, volunteers with Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, knock on doors in Leawood, Kan., to encourage people to reject a state constitutional amendment that could further restrict access on abortion in Kansas. (Christopher Smith/For the Washington Post) Comment on this story
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OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – At a recent meeting of abortion-rights seekers in a strip mall office in this Kansas City suburb, a hand-lettered sign on the wall summed up the confusion over the looming ballot question of the state in two lines: a “No” equals support for abortion rights, “yes” means against abortion rights.
Kansans will head to the polls on August 2 to decide whether the state constitution protects the right to abortion, the first such constitutional amendment to be determined since the Supreme Court’s historic overturn . Roe v. Wade, end federal protection, June 24. More than a dozen Republican states have already moved by other means to ban or further restrict abortion in the wake of the decision that overturned Roe.
The ballot measure, if passed, would effectively overturn a 2019 decision by the state Supreme Court that enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution. The move could pave the way for the Legislature to pass an abortion ban at a time when Kansas has become a destination for pregnant patients fleeing strict abortion laws in nearby states.
While the vote is expected to be close, abortion rights advocates say they face an uphill battle to overcome obstacles they say the Republican legislature has deliberately put in their way, including holding of voting on a primary day and not during the general election. , and the complicated wording of the amendment that has confused many voters.
“When they say on TV they say yes or no, it’s confusing to me,” said Rotonda Johnson, 56, of Wichita. He recently spoke with organizers from Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, a group that opposes the amendment and supports abortion rights. — and asked for guidance to find out. “I had to ask, in what way for yes and in what way for no? Either way, I don’t think the government should stop abortion.”
The energy surrounding the pitched battle in the state is palpable: As Kansas melts under an oppressive heat wave, collectors on both sides of the debate have been knocking on doors for a while. early voting began on July 13. “Stop the ban: Vote No” and “Vote Yes!” Signs dot lawns and televisions are buzzing with nearly $2 million in ads, according to tracking firm AdImpact.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” said Brittany Jones, spokeswoman for Value Them Both, an anti-abortion coalition that includes Kansans for Life, the Kansas Catholic Conference and others that have worked for decades to end the ‘abortion in a deeply red state, which hasn’t voted a Democrat for president since Lyndon B. Johnson.
Value Them Both and other abortion advocates, who have knocked on more than 100,000 doors, have taken the public position that the ballot measure will not automatically lead to an outright ban on abortion, but rather will protect what they call reasonable safeguards approved before the state. high court decision in 2019. Kansas allows abortion up to 22 weeks of pregnancy with additional restrictions, including a mandatory 24-hour waiting period and parental consent for minors.
University of Kansas law professor Stephen McAllister, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who served as the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for Kansas, said they are being disingenuous and that the target real of the amendment is to open the way for the republican. – He led the legislature to pass an absolute ban on abortion in its next session in January.
“Their big lie is that they simply want to clear the decks so we can have a reasonable debate about what regulations might be appropriate, and that’s not all,” McAllister said. “The goal is to clear the decks so they can ban abortion next session. That’s what it’s all about.”
Jones said that claim is “absolutely not true.” But the Kansas Reflector, a news website, obtained audio from a meeting in Reno County, Kansas, last month in which Republican state Sen. Mark Steffen said that if the amendment passed, the Legislature could pass more laws, “with my life goal starting at conception.” Steffen, a physician, declined to comment.
new election laws that make it a crime to knowingly impersonate an election official have had a “chilling” impact on voter registrations. before the election, according to Jacqueline Lightcap, co-chair of the Kansas League of Women Voters. The group typically registers more than 6,000 Kansans in a typical election year, but halted its efforts this year out of fear that it would, even inadvertently, run afoul of the new law.
Republicans in the state legislature she had the abortion measure on the ballot as a special election alongside previously scheduled primaries, where traditionally only party-affiliated voters can vote. Many of the The state’s unaffiliated voters — about 30 percent of the electorate — may not know they can vote this time, said Davis Hammet, the president and founder of Loud Light, a voter advocacy group. , which called the move “blatantly undemocratic.”
“This is not a campaign of persuasion; it’s about trying to inform people that an election is even happening and that it’s going to happen in August,” Hammet said.
Kansas has long been at the center of the abortion debate. The state’s laws were once considered among the least restrictive in the nation, sparking the 1991 Summer of Mercy anti-abortion protests, when thousands of protesters converged on Wichita and were arrested in raids and clinic blockades. In 2009, George Tiller, one of the few third-trimester abortion providers in the country, was murdered in Wichita by an anti-abortion extremist.
In recent years, Kansans have been slightly less supportive of abortion rights than the country as a whole, experts say. For example, an Associated Press VoteCast poll of 2020 election voters in Kansas found that 54% said abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, while 44% said it should be mostly or always legal, compared to 59% nationwide who thought abortion should be. be legal However, the AP poll found that 62 percent of Kansas voters had wanted the Supreme Court gone Roe v. Wade how it was, while 35 percent said it should be overturned (nationally, 69 percent said the court should Roe as it was).
Gabrielle Lara, 23, has led outreach efforts in the Kansas City area for Students for Life Action, an anti-abortion group, since graduating in May from Benedictine College, a nearby Catholic school. Originally from California, she said she grew up supporting abortion rights in a household where the issue was rarely discussed. But she changed her mind after watching a friend endure guilt and shame after an abortion three years ago, she said.
Many of the people he’s met doing research in the Kansas City suburbs haven’t made up their minds yet, he said.
“There are a lot of swing voters in certain areas, voters planning to vote on the day and wanting to do more research,” he said. “They have a lot of questions afterwards Roe v. Wade and be the first state to have an electoral initiative. It’s really something that’s very important to us here in Kansas.”
Last year, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment released statistics showing a 9 percent increase in total abortions between 2019 and 2020, prompting criticism from abortion opponents, who charged that the state was becoming an abortion “sanctuary” led by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. Much of that increase was due to short-term pandemic restrictions at clinics in Oklahoma and Texas, officials said. Although preliminary data this year show a 4 percent increase in abortions between 2020 and 2021, most of them were from patients in the state, the agency said.
McAllister, the law professor, was the state’s attorney general in 2017 when he argued to the court that abortion was not guaranteed by the state constitution in the case decided in 2019. He said he believed that nearly five decades of federal protection for abortion was a settled case. law and did not expect Roe to be overturned
“Where we’re going with bans and trying to make things a crime, I find that appalling and unacceptable,” McAllister said. “The trickery and deception going on here in Kansas with the amendment disgusts me; people pretend this is something it’s not.”
The amendment states that there is no constitutional right to abortion in Kansas and would “reserve to the people of Kansas, through their elected state legislators, the right to pass laws to regulate abortion, including, among others, in circumstances of pregnancy that result”. of rape or incest, or when necessary to save the life of the mother”.
On a recent hot Sunday afternoon, abortion rights supporters Sheila Gregory, 24, a political consultant, Emily Daniel, 28, a research assistant, and Cariann Dureka, 23, an art director and communications, went out into the quiet streets of Leawood, mostly. White, affluent city whose voters gave heavily to Donald Trump in 2016. The three tracked non-potential votes on the MiniVAN mobile research app.
Each woman had been raised in a conservative Christian home and came to feel her feelings about a woman’s right to choose during her college years, they said.
As Daniel walked, she said she wished she and others her age had been more mindful of the years of warnings the Supreme Court was about to overturn. Roe. She doubted it Roewhich he considered “settled law,” would stand until the day it was overturned, he said.
“I learned an important lesson: if people are giving warnings,…