In good news today, Kansas has voted against
removing the right to abortions in the state.
Now, the right to an abortion is actually part of the Kansas state constitution.
And the right wing in the state, and I should note this is a reliably red state,
wanted to essentially do away with that constitutional right
according to their state constitution by adding an amendment.
Now, the amendment is what the voters got to make a decision on,
that is what they voted on.
It was direct democracy here.
And when you consider the fact that the majority of voters in the state of Kansas
happened to be Republican voters, this is a pretty good sign.
I'm liking this.
So what happened?
Well, the question was, in this ballot initiative,
should the Kansas Constitution be amended to remove protections of abortion rights?
And as you can see from the results with 95% of precincts reporting,
58.8% say, no, we do not want to amend our state
constitution to do away with abortion rights.
41.2% said yes, they want that.
But as you can tell, that is a very clear majority in the no category of this vote,
which makes me very happy.
Now, the amendment had it passed,
would have removed the abortion protections from the state constitution.
That doesn't mean that abortion would automatically be illegal in the state of
Kansas.
But what it did mean is that it would open the path for
lawmakers in the states, Republican lawmakers mainly,
who would start passing legislation that of course, would restrict abortion and
potentially ban abortion outright with very few exceptions.
Now, this is important for a number of different reasons.
The implications are critical here.
Because Kansas has really become one of these states that women
travel to in order to access abortion, in order to access reproductive care.
And if Kansas had decided to vote in favor of this amendment, well,
then there would be women in many other red states surrounding Kansas who
would lose one of the few options that are now available to them.
Now, registered Republicans far outnumber Democrats in Kansas.
In interviews last week in populous Johnson County Kansas, a number of
voters said they were registered Republicans but opposed the amendment,
a dynamic that almost certainly played out across the state given the margin.
In fact, I love this quote from 90 year old Republican voter,
Norma Hamilton, who said this, I like the women's rights.
[LAUGH] So she voted no.
She voted no, because guess what?
She's a woman, Norma Hamilton, who likes women's rights.
Who thinks that a woman should get to decide what to do with her body.
She believes that a woman should not have to explain herself to the government or
have the government involved in the decisions that she and
her doctor make about her own body and her own health.
And this shouldn't be surprising considering various polls, national polls
that show upwards of 70% of voters, which obviously includes Republicans,
are supportive of maintaining reproductive rights for women.
So even with that information and all of that in mind,
there was still some fear that this red state would do away with
this constitutional right, and luckily they did not do that.
Here's some more information.
Many Kansans who support abortion rights say they feared that a total or
near total abortion ban would be passed within months.
Abortion is now legal in Kansas up to 22 weeks, okay?
So again, this is a big deal.
Not only is it a big deal because it shows where the hearts and
minds of American voters are today, including Republican voters.
It shows you that Republicans on a federal level are pushing for
policies that are incredibly unpopular.
And all Democrats have to do is incessantly call them out on it.
Make it a big issue.
Use it for your campaigning purposes.
These are individuals who are not in line with what their own voters prefer.
And the messaging needs to reflect that from the Democratic Party and
from Democratic candidates.
Scott Schwab, a Republican Secretary of state by the way,
predicted that around 36% of Kansas voters would participate in this
election because they would be galvanized by this abortion issue.
Though, he later said there were signs turnout would actually be much higher.
His office said that the constitutional amendment has increased voter interest in
the election.
So again, it had galvanized voters to show up, cast their ballot,
take part in sharing their opinion on where this ballot initiative should go.
And luckily they believe that it should go in the trash.
Now, it's important to protect abortion rights through the state's constitution
because of what I had mentioned earlier.
That so many women in other states,
other red states that have now banned abortion effectively,
rely on Kansas to get the reproductive care that they need in recent years.
And especially in the weeks since Roe fell,
meaning when the Supreme Court reversed Roe v Wade, Kansas has become
a haven of abortion access in a region where that is increasingly rare.
Even before the Supreme Court's action, get a load of this,
nearly half of the abortions performed in Kansas involved out of state residents.
So you've got women traveling to Kansas from Oklahoma, from Missouri,
from states that have banned abortion or have severely restricted it.
They're traveling to Kansas to get the care that they need to get the abortions
that they need.
And the idea of Kansas no longer being a state that
provides that was gonna be incredibly damaging for these women.
And it could have cost lives, let's just keep it real, right?
Whether it would be through women taking matters into their own hands and
doing something unsafe, back alley abortions.
We're back in that era in America where women didn't have options.
They didn't have the ability to make decisions about their own bodies,
and they would basically put themselves at risk in order to terminate a pregnancy
that they did not want.
Now, the push for an amendment,
it's important to understand the context here in the history.
The push for the amendment was rooted in a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court
that struck down some abortion restrictions, and
found that the right to an abortion was guaranteed by the state constitution.
That decision infuriated Republicans who had spent years passing abortion
restrictions and campaigning on the issue.
They used their supermajorities in the legislature
last year to place the issue on the 2022 ballot.
So the voters have spoken.
And what's interesting is that the religious zealots in
the state of Kansas aren't done yet.
They're undeterred, right?
The fact that their ballot initiative fell here, or failed here,
doesn't really matter to them.
They will continue fighting to ensure that abortion is no longer available,
because again, they love theocratic rule.
They love being able to have the government control women's bodies, and
the decisions they get to make about themselves and their own lives.
And so they'll keep fighting.
But a really great way of mitigating whatever strategies they have in mind to
ensure that they dismantle abortion rights in the state of Kansas, yeah,
that could be mitigated with the other side, with the opposition shaming them.
Because it's clear that the voters don't like the idea of banning abortion.
So keep calling out the religious zealots who want to ban abortion,
shame them for doing it, call them out for doing it.
Make politicians in the state of Kansas who are fighting for this,
fighting to ban abortion in the state of Kansas, make them pariahs.
You can do it. Republicans are real good at messaging.
They're very good at convincing American voters that Democratic
lawmakers are dangerous individuals who are engaged in pedophilia and
child sex trafficking rings.
I mean, there's no telling how low they're willing to go in
order to destroy the opposition.
I'd like to see a little bit of that fight from the Democratic Party.
They're afraid to use the word abortion, which I think is strange.
They're afraid to call out their opponents on their deeply unpopular policies,
and they gotta start getting comfortable with doing it.
Otherwise they're just gonna continue missing these layups.
This is a layup.
The voters have spoken.
This is an example of direct democracy where these voters had the opportunity to
vote directly on about initiative pertaining to reproductive rights.
So if you know where the voters are, you should use that to your advantage.
And I just haven't really seen much of that fight from Democrats either on
a state level and certainly not on a federal level.