Hello Abortion Rights in Kansas, Goodbye "Pro Life"


Abortion rights continued its series of wins with one in Kansas. It won in Ireland and other countries. This is the first popular vote since Roe was overturned. I had to chuckle when I recall a national columnist who said overturning Roe was "instructive," meaning it would persuade people they should be against abortion. Almost 60% of voters in Kansas voted to retain abortion rights? That is what I call "instructive." A big majority of women, and probably a majority of men, want to retain abortion rights.

Donald Trump won Kansas by 15%. That alone would signal that anti-abortion would win. What Trump's win, nor polls showing anti-abortion would win, did not anticipate was a huge surge in voter turnout. The turnout was a record. Turn out is something that has happened in other public-wide votes where one segment of the population has something definite at stake. Obama's elections illustrated this. It has been seen before in women's rights. When women are threatened, they turn out to vote in huge numbers. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part, but I see big turnouts of angry women in the upcoming primaries.

A side light in the Kansas vote were patently false email messages sent out by an anti-abortion political operative. It instructed choice voters to vote "yes" instead of the correct vote of "no." Lying has been in the toolbox of anti-abortion since day one. You can read about it in the second link.

I think the big NO vote reflected class. When no-nothing politicians pass legislation to make abortion more difficult, upper middle-class Republicans don't mind. They don't mind because they have money and friends to help arrange an abortion wherever and whenever one is needed. It does not matter to them poor women are put in a serious bind by having to make two or more visits to a clinic and spend money on travel. But when anti-abortion operatives don't limit their political business to poor women and cause trouble for Republicans in the upper middle and up classes, the latter will put the hammer down. They did just that in Kansas. 

As a result of this vote, we will see even more effort by conservatives to making voting more difficult. Another result might, however, be that abortion rights groups see how successful they have been and start using the public vote system, instead of state legislators, as way to pass more liberal abortion rights laws.

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