Missouri, learn from Kansas. Moderate, reasonable abortion rights are what voters want

Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative to revise its constitution, which would have allowed the Legislature to outlaw abortion.

There’s an obvious question for Missouri pro-choice advocates: What should we do to bring our sister state in line with our Kansas neighbors?

Let’s talk first about what happened in Kansas.

In 2019, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution, in guaranteeing Kansans’ “equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” implicitly guarantee a woman’s right to bodily autonomy and thus the right to abortion. This is very much in line with the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretations in its Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey decisions.

That ruling did not confer a woman’s unilateral right to an abortion throughout the entire term of her pregnancy. In Kansas, abortion is legal up to 20 weeks post-fertilization, and after that point only in cases when the mother’s health is endangered. Beyond that 20-week period, the state of Kansas has a legitimate interest in protecting the rights of the unborn fetus. This thinking is not only consistent with Roe and Casey, but is also in line with the abortion laws of most European countries.

Putting aside the unclear text of the Kansas ballot language, and the GOP’s attempt to ensure the petition’s passage by scheduling the vote in the August primary election (in which Republican voters are more likely to turn out than Democrats), it should surprise nobody that the people rejected the proposal. By almost every polling measure, more than 60% of Americans favor abortion rights as defined by Roe and Casey and by the Kansas Supreme Court. Only 20% of Americans favor a near-total ban on abortion.

And yet proponents of the amendment made the mistake of reaching for language that would have allowed politicians to impose an outright ban. Surely this initiative was doomed. But we live in an era of extremes on both sides of every issue, and the anti-abortion-rights extremists did the extreme thing they were destined to do. And, predictably, they failed.

Now. What should Missouri pro-choice advocates learn, and do, in response?

We need a pro-choice amendment petition to guarantee abortion rights in line with our sister state. That amendment could guarantee the right to abortion perhaps through 18 weeks or so, and later in consideration of the mother’s health.

We need to put aside our pro-choice extremist tendencies to overreach for unilateral abortion rights throughout pregnancy. That view, like the extremist anti-abortion view, is favored by only 20% of Americans, and a petition for those rights is every bit as doomed to failure as the Kansas amendment.

The moderate position of reasonably limited abortion rights would give Missouri women what they need: an opportunity to recognize their own pregnancies, and to make careful, informed choices in line with their own bodily autonomy. It would also respect the logical pro-life idea that the state has a legitimate interest in protecting the rights of a late-term fetus, as well as the rights of its mother.

It is our moral duty to make that moderate, sensible, helpful petition a reality to rein in our own extremist legislature and governor. I may not be smart enough to word the petition language, but I would certainly volunteer to stand with a clipboard and collect signatures to get it on the ballot.

And I can almost promise it would pass — because most Missouri voters, like those in Kansas, are reasonable, moderate people.

John Huhman of Columbia worked around the world for 33 years as an oil engineer.