Abortion rights face test in Kansas vote, the first of its kind since the fall of Roe

Kansas primary voters on Tuesday will be the first in the country to decide statewide on the right to abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, putting abortion access at risk in one of the few Midwestern states that allows the procedure.

A state constitutional amendment on the primary ballot would declare that there is no right to an abortion in Kansas, though that right was protected in a state Supreme Court ruling in 2019.

The vote is not just a crucial test for Kansans but a possible bellwether across the country as Americans decide the future of abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned the nearly 50-year precedent of Roe.

If the Kansas amendment passes, an abortion ban would not immediately take effect. That would require passage by the state Legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority. Democrats said a ban would be imminent if the amendment passes.

“What I have been told from people across the aisle that are friends of mine is that if this amendment passes on Aug. 2, that they were told to be prepared to return to Topeka for a special session to vote on a bill,” Democratic state Sen. Cindy Holscher said.

Coalitions on both sides have raised millions and knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors as they try to boost turnout in a state where primary elections see fewer than half the voters of a general election.

“There’s signs on every person’s yard either for yes or no, churches have ‘Vote yes’ signs that are half the size of billboards. It’s hard to find someone that doesn’t have a strong stance on the vote, one way or the other,” said Annie Noll, 37, a writer and mother of four who lives in a suburb of Kansas City.

More: The fight over abortion will be on the ballot this November in at least 5 states

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Anti-abortion advocates say the amendment is 'abortion-neutral' 

Though the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 to protect the right to an abortion, lawmakers still can adopt restrictions.

And they have. Kansas has a 24-hour waiting period for an abortion and mandatory ultrasounds, requires parental consent for minors and bans all abortions after 22 weeks.

In March, a Kansas lawmaker introduced a bill that would have criminalized abortion, with no exceptions for incest or rape. That bill died in committee last session, but Holscher said it could be revived if voters decide against a state constitutional right to an abortion.

“From the perspective of those of us who work in Topeka, that bill was basically introduced to have it teed up and ready to go after this primary election,” she said.

Anti-abortion advocates are working to persuade voters to adopt the amendment. Danielle Underwood,spokeswoman at Kansans for Life, said the amendment itself is not a ban on abortion but “abortion-neutral.”

The decision of whether to allow abortion should be up to elected officials, not the court, she said.

“Passing an amendment is the one remedy Kansans have available to them to be able to correct judicial overreach and to be able to define for ourselves what we believe is a proper understanding of the scope of our law in our state,” Underwood said.

In leaked audio from a meeting of Republicans in Reno County, northwest of Wichita, Lori Chrisman, who described herself as an 18-county regional director for the anti-abortion Value Them Both Coalition, said a total ban on abortion was ready to go once the amendment passed.

Underwood said Chrisman was a “former temporary field Value Them Both staff, not a spokesperson, and was not part of any leadership discussions within the Value Them Both Coalition.”

Abortion access advocates see those comments as another indication that amending the constitution will immediately lead to an outright ban.

“This amendment gives politicians the power to pass any law they want regarding abortion, including a total ban with no exceptions,” said Ashley All, a spokesperson for Kansas for Constitutional Rights, a coalition leading the campaign against the amendment.

Independent voters key in deciding amendment

Abortion rights advocates are concerned about turnout. Primary elections are almost always for partisan races, but the 500,000 Kansas voters who are not affiliated with either party are the second-largest voting bloc in the state behind Republicans.

Those unaffiliated voters could be crucial in deciding whether abortion should be protected in the state constitution.

The Republican supermajority in Topeka leaves Democrats with little power to advocate for exceptions for rape and incest or to move the amendment to the higher-turnout general election, said Stephanie Byers, a Democratic state representative.

Byers is the first openly transgender person to serve in the Kansas Legislature and the first Native American transgender legislator in the USA. She said she’s concerned about how the vote will affect LGBTQ and Native American Kansans.

“When we start talking about laws that affect body autonomy, that directly impacts people like me,” she said. “Even as a person who is not a birthing person, it still impacts me because it has to deal with how I work with my physician on the choices regarding what I do with my body.”

University of Kansas graduate student Chloe Gunville, 28, decided to canvass for the first time because she felt it was important to advocate for abortion access to marginalized communities.

“As a woman of color, it's kind of intimidating to go into these spaces where I'm not sure if I'm welcome, in regards to just different views politically,” said Gunville, who is Native American. “This vote is not only going to affect me, but marginalized women, women of color, and there’s a history of sterilization of Native women in the 1960s and 1970s, including my grandmother, who went in for a routine procedure and they gave her a hysterectomy. I want to protect women’s choices over their bodies.”

Holscher said she has seen a surge of voter registration among independent voters and Democrats since the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

“The Dobbs decision coming down was really kind of a lightning rod that really seemed to get people engaged and alert. People had a general awareness that the amendment was coming, but when the Dobbs decision came down, it just made the situation 1000 times more real to people,” Holscher said.

Abortion not necessarily along partisan lines in Kansas 

Before Tuesday’s vote, Kansas voters who spoke to USA TODAY said people in every corner of the state are talking about the amendment.

Heather Byers, 32, a street artist in Wichita, said that when she sent her kids to day camp this summer, even “the kids are all talking about it, because it’s been in the news.”

“I feel like the conversation has been impossible to avoid,” she said. “It seems like everyone around me has ‘vote no’ signs, but it’s a big state. But I have done some work recently in more rural towns and have seen those ‘vote no’ signs there, too.”

All, the Kansas for Abortion spokesperson, said the campaign against the amendment has support among moderates and Republicans because the question tends to go beyond party lines in the state.

“I think that most Kansans don't necessarily see this issue as partisan,” she said. “This is an issue that people often don't talk about, but when you start to have conversations, you realize that people are not quite as far apart as we tend to believe they are. A lot of folks understand that this is an important health care related issue between a woman and her doctor.”

In the Value Them Both Coalition, Underwood estimated the group has knocked on more than 275,000 doors before the vote.

Adam Barlow Thompson, an ordained minister, said he'll vote against the amendment and supports abortion access.

“Every block you go down right now has a vote yes or vote no sign, or multiple, depending on what part of town you're in,” he said.

In what is expected to be a close election, Thompson said he hoped communities would remain intact even over such a contentious debate.

“One of the last remaining places people of all political beliefs interact with each other is our blocks," he said. "It could be easy to see that my neighbor has put up a sign that I don't agree with and immediately write them off because of that. I would discourage that, because what we know is that if we reduce our neighbors to just a single political issue, and then start making assumptions about who they are based on that, that it weakens our communities.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Abortion access: Kansas first to vote on state referendum post-Roe