The Trump-Voting Kansas Electorate Is a Better Protector of Abortion Rights Than the Supreme Court
The resounding defeat of a ballot initiative to strip abortion rights from the Kansas state constitution is a reminder that we don’t need to rely on benevolent philosopher-kings in black robes to protect our rights. We can mobilize popular majorities.
Kansas residents applauded the Kansans for Constitutional Freedom in Overland Park, Kansas on August 2, 2022 for voting no on a constitutional amendment that would have removed the right to an abortion from the Kansas constitution. (Tammy Ljungblad / Kansas City Star / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Kansas is, to put it mildly, not a particularly liberal state. The last Democrat to carry it in a presidential election was Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — and he was also the first Democrat to win there since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. In 2004, the state was used as a case study in the triumph of conservatism in Thomas Frank’s best-selling book What’s the Matter with Kansas?
But last week voters rejected a ballot measure to strip abortion rights from the state’s constitution with a vote of 58.97 percent — an even bigger percentage than Donald Trump won there in 2020 (56.21 percent). It’s a striking reminder that our choices aren’t limited to giving up on basic rights or hoping that benevolent philosopher-kings in black robes will protect them for us. We can mobilize democratic majorities.
Against the Civics-Class Conception of Rights
Individual rights don’t get much more fundamental than the right to control what goes on inside of your body. As moral philosopher Margaret Olivia Little points out in her classic paper “Abortion, Intimacy, and the Duty to Gestate,” even if we assume for the sake of argument that a literally mindless early-trimester fetus already counts a “person,” we’d still be talking about “a person whose blood is being oxygenated by another’s lungs, a person whose hormonal activity in turn affects that other’s brain and metabolism, a person whose growing size enlarges another’s physical boundaries.” Legally forcing a pregnant woman to maintain this state of “extraordinary physical enmeshment” against her will would still be a profound violation of her bodily autonomy.
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