Kansas Resoundingly Rejects Restrictions on Abortion Rights

In the first test of whether or not the religious extremist majority on the U.S. Supreme Court has handed Democrats and progressive a winning issue to motivate voters to go to the polls by overturning Roe v. Wade, the vote in Kansas suggests the answer is "yes" after twice the normal voter turn out went to the polls to vote against efforts to further restrict abortion access in that state. Not surprisingly, abortion opponents and Republicans seeking further restriction did what they always do: lied and sought to mis-lead voters into supporting more restrictions and/or a ban.  Thankfully, the strategy failed and voters sent a message to Justice Alito and the other American Taliban on the Court that they rejected the effort to inflict one set of religious beliefs on all citizens.  It will be telling if Democrats can channel this anger at the Court and anti-abortion Republicans into a large anti-Republican turnout in November.  As one piece noted, it is as if Republicans have ignored the reality that women still have the right to vote and may demand control over their own bodies.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the Kansas results:

In a major victory for abortion rights, Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected an effort to strip away their state’s abortion protections, sending a decisive message about the issue’s popularity in the first political test since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

The overwhelming support for abortion rights in a traditionally conservative state bolsters Democrats’ hopes that the historic Supreme Court ruling will animate their voters in an otherwise difficult election year for their party. The Kansas vote signals that abortion is an energizing issue that could affect turnout in the November midterms.

The question presented to voters here was whether abortion protections should be stripped from the state constitution. A “yes” vote would allow Kansas’s Republican-led legislature to pass future limits on abortion — or ban it altogether — in its coming session in January. A “no” vote would leave those protections in place.

With 90 percent of the vote counted, 60 percent of voters [perhaps 62% in one piece] wanted to maintain those abortion protections compared with 40 percent who wanted to remove them from the state constitution. Turnout for Tuesday’s primary election far exceeded other contests in recent years . . . nearly twice as many as the 473,438 who turned out in the 2018 primary election.

Abortion rights advocates pointed to their resounding win here as evidence that Americans are angry about the efforts to roll back women’s rights.

“At a time when reproductive freedom is under unprecedented threat across the country, Kansans said loud and clear at the ballot box: ‘We’ve had enough’,”  . . . “In the heartland of the United States, protecting abortion access is galvanizing voters like never before.”

Rachel Sweet, the campaign director for the Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, told the crowd that the vote was “truly an historic day for Kansas and an historic day for America” to cheers. “Kansans have spoken loud and clear: We will not tolerate extreme bans on abortion in our state,” Sweet said.

The antiabortion movement believes “women are meant to be child-makers,” Angermuller continued. “They want us to be barefoot and pregnant all the time. Not to have aspirations.”

Since the Supreme Court ruling, more than a dozen Republican-led states have moved to ban or further restrict abortion. Abortion is currently legal in Kansas in the first 22 weeks of pregnancy, and the state has become a refuge for pregnant patients seeking procedures who are from states with stricter laws, including Texas and Oklahoma.

As voters went to the polls, The Washington Post reported that a Republican-backed group had sent voters intentionally misleading text messages about the ballot language.

Proponents of abortion rights say that the Republican legislature has stacked the deck in its favor, passing tighter restrictions that have made it harder to register new voters, choosing to hold the vote on a primary day rather than during the general election and selecting a ballot question with convoluted wording that has confused many voters.

The lesson is clear: women who want to control their own bodies - and men with wives, daughters and granddaughters - need to register to vote and vote out as many Republicans at all levels of government in November and all future elections.