Irish Examiner view: Victory for abortion rights in US

Resounding victory in traditionally conservative state of Kansas shows American anger over efforts to roll back women’s rights

People hug during a Value Them Both watch party after a question involving a constitutional amendment removing abortion protections from the Kansas constitution failed on Tuesday in Overland Park, Kansas. Picture: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel

Pro-choice campaigners in America — fighting a rearguard battle after the US Supreme Court struck down Roe V Wade earlier this year — received a huge boost this week when voters in Kansas rejected an effort to strip their state’s abortion protections.

Abortion rights campaigners say the resounding victory in the traditionally conservative state is concrete evidence that Americans are angry about efforts to roll back women’s rights.

With around 90% of the vote counted, some 60% wanted to maintain abortion protections, while 40% wanted them removed from the state constitution.

Turnout for the vote was astonishing and some 900,000 Kansans voted, compared with 473,438 who turned out for a similar poll in 2018. The result means Kansas has given forced-birth zealots a bloody nose and an estimated 540,000 reasons to be afraid that their agenda will not gain traction across the country.

And, worse than that, it has also emerged that a Republican-backed group sent deliberately misleading texts about the ballot language. A political action committee led by Tim Huelskamp, a former hardline Kansas Republican congressman, paid a technology company to send out texts to voters saying: “Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.”

Such underhand tactics are a well-versed part of the anti-abortion lobby’s modus operandi in America, and they also spent an estimated $11m in Kansas alone on television, radio, and social media advertising. Kansas has long been a hotbed of anti-abortion activism, and during the ‘Summer of Mercy’ anti-abortion protests in 1991, thousands of protestors descended on Wichita, only to be arrested at sit-ins and clinic blockades. In 2009, one of the country’s few third-trimester abortion providers, George Tiller, was assassinated in Wichita by an anti-abortion extremist.

The Kansas vote is seen as the first concrete evidence of a major backlash against the Supreme Court decision. Republicans in other states might do well to heed the Kansas result. Republican representatives in Kentucky and Louisiana have already passed outright bans, and Florida has legislation which now severely restricts access to abortion.

Ahead of November’s mid-term elections, the Kansas result may now force fanatical Republican lawmakers to reconsider. The Democrats, however, feel that the national backlash against the historic Supreme Court decision will benefit them in a few months’ time and will animate their voters in what appeared to be an otherwise difficult election year for the party.