Kansas Is the First Battle in the Post-Roe Abortion War

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : Anti-abortion protesters demonstrating against the state's relatively permissive laws blanketed Kansas in 1991, and the 2009 murder of physician George Tiller, who ran an abortion clinic in Wichita until he was killed by an anti-abortion activist, remains fresh in many people's memory.
59% : The amendment's opponents say that anti-abortion advocates are obscuring their true intent.
49% : Democrats say they've encountered voters who believe a "Yes" vote is an affirmation of abortion rights, as well as others who have been taken in by the "Yes" campaign's soft messaging that the amendment simply allows for the regulation of abortion.
46% : This is not a ban on abortion," Danielle Underwood, a spokesperson for the coalition backing the ballot question, told me.
45% : The referendum will be the first direct vote on abortion since the Supreme Court eliminated a nearly 50-year-old national right to terminate a pregnancy, and Democrats will get an indication of just how much the decision could motivate their voters to turn out this fall.
45% : "It doesn't end abortion," he said of the amendment, "but it provides the means to do so."
44% : Without the amendment, they say, the same judges who recognized a constitutional right to abortion in Kansas could soon wipe out the regulations the state already has on the books, including a ban on late-term abortions and a parental-notification requirement.
44% : Abortion has long played an outsize role in Kansas politics.
43% : Passage of the amendment would prohibit taxpayer funding of abortion, but the procedure itself would still be legal -- at least until the Republican legislature convenes to wield the power voters will have given lawmakers to outlaw it, a result that is almost universally presumed.
43% : Approving the measure, they tell voters, would simply reserve for the people (and their elected representatives) the "choice" to "regulate" abortion.
43% : Ads run by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom strike a libertarian note, describing the amendment as a license for a "government mandate" barring abortion and comparing the issue to the fraught debate over vaccine and masking requirements during the pandemic.
42% : Abortion foes drafted the amendment in response to a 2019 decision by the Kansas Supreme Court ruling that the state's constitution protected the right to abortion.
41% : Democrats believe that Republican legislators will take even a slim margin of victory as a mandate to ban abortion across the state.
39% : The amendment declares that such a right does not exist in the constitution, thereby allowing the legislature to limit or ban abortion as it sees fit.
39% : Conservative state legislators have already introduced a bill that would ban abortion without exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother -- a proposal broadly similar to laws that other red states have put in place since the overturning of Roe.
39% : One of them was describing his message to persuade "abolitionists" -- supporters of a total ban on abortion -- to vote for a measure that falls short of that goal.
38% : In between spritzes of water from a spray fan, she lays out bumper stickers and yard signs urging voters to reject a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would allow the Republican-dominated legislature to ban abortion in Kansas.
38% : Inveighing against "a culture of chaos" in America, Perkins characterized the conservative majority on the Supreme Court as "repenting of abortion" with its decision to overturn Roe in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision.
37% : Kansas is surrounded by states that either have already outlawed abortion, such as Missouri and Oklahoma, or will try to in the months ahead, such as Iowa and Nebraska.
37% : At the same polling place, Nikki, 64, told me that she voted in favor of the amendment even though she opposes a ban on abortion.
35% : The aim of outlawing abortion is far from the official line of the Value Them Both Coalition, but it slips out frequently.
34% : "I found the debate confusing," she said, adding that she ultimately voted "yes" because she opposes taxpayer funding of abortion.
33% : Wales, of Planned Parenthood, told me that the Tiller murder still makes it difficult to attract doctors willing to perform abortions in Kansas -- so much so that Planned Parenthood has been unable to meet the surge in demand from women traveling to Kansas from states where the procedure is, in most cases, already illegal.

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