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 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 — 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 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 rejected the amendment. Abortion opponents then forced a recount, 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 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 decided to simply rewrite the rules. If the current crop of Kansas Supreme Court justices won’t ban abortion, and the public won’t vote to ban abortion, then why not make it easier for right-wing money to influence who ends up on the state’s supreme court?
That’s what’s at the heart of this amendment — opening the floodgates to right-wing mega-donors to pour millions of dollars into judicial elections, with the ultimate goal of banning abortion and hindering a whole host of civil and constitutional rights.
Partisan elections for state supreme court judges could open the door to major partisan dollars coming into Kansas, influencing the results beyond what voters want or don’t want.
In states like Ohio and North Carolina, which changed their state supreme court appointments to direct election, there has been a dramatic influx of partisan cash. Not only that, but a recent study found that judges who are elected are more likely to side with their respective party when ruling on election cases, in particular. And opponents of abortion rights are once again using confusing language in their proposed amendment, hoping to hoodwink voters into opting for what seems like a democratic proposal but is actually designed to lay the groundwork for the eradication of their constitutional rights, ones they have already voted to protect.
This isn’t a good faith effort to increase the political power of the people — it’s a blatant attempt to undermine the integrity of judicial elections in Kansas in an effort to do what abortion opponents have been unable to do for decades: ban abortion in the state. And the stakes go beyond Kansas.
It’s not just that Kansas has become a hub for abortion in the region; it’s also a signal to other battleground states that if neither the courts nor the public will ban abortion, they can simply change the rules to make it easier. Kansas has already voted on this specific issue, and the majority made it clear the right to an abortion was to remain in the state constitution. Research of the broader American electorate is likewise clear and consistent: 60 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and two-thirds of Americans oppose abortion bans. Legal abortion is popular, and abortion opponents know that. They don’t want unfiltered power in the hands of voters — they want to be able to influence, misinform, and lie their way to electing partisan judges who will ban abortion anyway.
On August 4, Kansans will once again head to the polls and try to defend their state from the continual and insidious attempts to ban what is, in that state, a constitutionally protected right. It’s up to the voters to once again see through this charade.
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