Kansas voters block effort to ban abortion in state constitutional amendment vote
Quote:
Abortion-rights forces scored an upset victory in Kansas on Tuesday when voters rejected an amendment that would have allowed the state legislature to ban the procedure.
The vote, which comes just six weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, means Kansas will remain one of the few red states where abortion is legal. It also provides hope to abortion-rights supporters who are betting on ballot initiatives in other conservative states to restore or maintain access to the procedure.
Emily Wales, the president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which covers Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, said seeing the effects of abortion bans recently going into effect in roughly a dozen states made the issue more tangible for Kansans and spurred them to vote no.
Turnout for the primary also soared above usual levels Tuesday, and in some counties was closer to the participation usually seen in a presidential election. The in-person early vote, which tends to favor Democrats, was also nearly 250 percent higher than the last primary midterm election in 2018, when both Democrats and Republicans had competitive governors’ races, while the number of mail-in ballots was more than double.
The “no” campaign also outperformed in fairly conservative areas — like in Shawnee County in the eastern part of the state, coming in several points ahead of President Joe Biden’s results there in 2020.
The referendum’s result particularly shocked the state because the pro-amendment campaign had some structural advantages heading into Tuesday, and they were ahead in recent polls.
Not only is Kansas a solidly red state that twice voted for President Donald Trump, but also the supermajority Republican legislature decided to schedule the vote for the primary instead of the general election. Turnout is usually far lower in August and favors Republicans, who have more competitive primaries than Democrats in Kansas. And many college students, who trend more progressive, are away for the summer.
Student activists working to defeat the amendment said they were all more motivated by what they saw as an underhanded effort to suppress their votes.
The final days leading up to the vote were also marked by tension and confusion.
Some lawn signs for the “Value Them Both” campaign had NO spray painted over them in black capital letters. Catholic churches — the main funders of the anti-abortion campaign — have also been vandalized, while abortion-rights demonstrators have been threatened with arrest.
On Saturday, a group of anti-abortion advocates marched up and down the sidewalks of Lawrence — a progressive college town — yelling “Don’t kill babies” at passersby.
On Sunday, an 18-year-old anti-abortion canvasser who came from Texas to volunteer with the group Students for Life said she was physically assaulted by a resident while knocking on doors in the Kansas City suburb of Leawood. She filed a police report and posted a video that doesn’t show the incident itself but shows the resident yelling and giving her the finger afterward.
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02 Aug 2022, 2:55 pm
