Kansas is the Free State. Cast your vote to defend women’s rights to that freedom
Kansas voters, we have less than one month to retain the moniker we love: Free State. The phrase wasn’t chosen at random. We earned it by abolishing slavery from Kansas Territory and drafting a constitution to be included as the 34th state. Men, women, former slaves, native-born or immigrants, were all granted citizenship with autonomy over their bodies in order to join the Union.
In the 1970s, after Roe v. Wade became law, each state in our country was also “free” in one important way. Before I turned 25, I knew three very close friends who had legal abortions. I also knew of several others — friends of friends. It was not all that common, but it was a legal, safe and necessary procedure for these people.
Before Roe, women were subject to illegal attempts to end their pregnancies. For us, it was safe and you could expect support from many friends and family. Even in cases where someone objected to it, woman could be free to live her life and move on. Adoption was an option some people took, but it was not a good choice for the women I knew.
These women were like me. We had boyfriends, we used some protection, we mostly got away with not getting pregnant. But we lived in Oklahoma, where it was not unusual to attend “shotgun weddings” between teenagers just graduated (or not) from high school. If you don’t know what that is, it’s an outdated term meaning marriage motivated (or forced) by a pregnancy.
There’s usually no store registry for starting out together, no steady jobs, sometimes no further chance of an education, no real commitment except to be parents to a newborn months later. Sometimes families stepped in when things fell apart.
Luckily, that didn’t happen to any of the people I am talking about. All three of my very close friends eventually met someone else they loved, got married and had children. Believe it or not, though we knew what they had gone through, we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about it. It was a legal medical procedure available to a woman who wanted to make a choice for herself.
There was one tiny detail wrong with the “shotgun” scenario: A woman should have autonomy over her body. Period. The partner responsible for the other half of the tango should have an opinion, a vote, but not a final say, just as the Supreme Court shouldn’t have the final say over her body. This is where our Free State status actually has credibility.
As it is now, though tenuous, Kansans have access to legal abortion health care. That’s what it’s called in the medical community. Abortion health care. Think of it as Heart Health, or a cast on a broken leg, or a set of braces for your teeth. It’s a medical procedure that involves one woman and one decision.
Since the morning of June 24, a lot of religious leaders have chimed in with their “definitions” of the beginning of life. You’ve heard them all. But what they are leaving out is the one life that is actually affected: that of the pregnant person. Hers is the life we have in our hearts. She’s a citizen of Kansas, a state that had the wherewithal to attach dignity to the lives it invited in.
Don’t let Kansas appear as just another red spot on the map. If you are a man, and want to be free, so do your sisters. Please vote no on Aug. 2 to banning legal abortion in our Free State.
