Access to Abortion in Kansas Is at Stake August 4 — But Voters May Not Know It

Access to Abortion in Kansas Is at Stake August 4 — But Voters May Not Know It By Lauren Rankin This article was originally published by Truthout Kansas’s safe haven status is now threatened again by abortion opponents who have decided to simply rewrite the rules. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from abortion opponents, it’s that abortion rights, no matter how many times they are affirmed and supported by the electorate, are never a settled issue. In August 2022, less than two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Kansas made a defiant (nytimes.com › results kansas abortion amendment) stand in favor of abortion rights, one that reverberated across the country. But abortion opponents refuse to take no for an answer. Now they’re back — with a new ploy. On August 4, almost four years to the day after Kansans voted to protect abortion rights, they will once again go to the polls with the future of reproductive freedom in their hands. The problem is, this time they might not know it. Voters in Kansas this August will decide the future of state supreme court judicial appointments. Currently, Kansas Supreme Court justices are nominated by a commission that screens candidates and are then appointed by the governor. The amendment would abolish the current system and instead have direct public elections of justices. While on its face, directly electing judges may not seem like a bad idea, in reality, this amendment isn’t about giving more power to the people or strengthening democratic institutions. Instead, it’s a naked attempt to insert partisanship into the judicial process and find a way around Kansas’s continued support for abortion rights. To understand how, we have to go back nearly a decade. In 2019, in a landmark 6-1 ruling, the Kansas Supreme Court declared that the state constitution protects the right to terminate a pregnancy, blocking an attempt by Republican lawmakers to ban a common kind of second-trimester abortion procedure. This ruling was as clear as it could be: Abortion is a fundamental right to Kansans. When Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, abortion remained legal in Kansas, unlike in neighboring states with preexisting trigger bans like Oklahoma and Missouri. Because of that 2019 ruling, banning abortion in the state would require more than passing a law; it would require a constitutional amendment. The 2022 effort — Amendment 2 (truthout.org) — would do just that: remove the right to an abortion from the state constitution. To that end, more than $22 million was spent to sway voters following the fall of Roe, and many abortion rights advocates were fearful that the referendum would doom legal abortion in Kansas. But that didn’t happen. In August 2022, despite language (theguardian.com › kansas abortion ballot language) in the proposed amendment designed to confuse voters about whether or not they were voting for abortion rights, that effort fell flat on its face when 59 percent of Kansas voters (nytimes.com › results kansas abortion amendment) rejected the amendment. Abortion opponents then forced a recount (axios.com › kansas abortion vote recount margin), which simply reaffirmed the results of the original tally. Since then, Kansas has served as a hub for abortion seekers from states with abortion bans like Oklahoma and Texas. Of the more than 19,000 abortions (kansasreflector.com) performed in Kansas in 2024 (up from nearly 8,000 total in 2021), three-quarters were patients from out of state. Kansas’s safe haven status is now threatened yet again by abortion opponents who, when openly defeated at the ballot box, have d