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(LifeSiteNews) – Kansas voters are going to the polls today to vote on a proposed amendment to the state constitution clarifying that it does not contain a right to abortion in order to prevent state courts from interfering with the people’s right to set abortion policy in a post-Roe v. Wade world.
Slated for an August 2nd vote, the referendum asks voters to consider adding the following language to the Kansas Constitution:
22. Regulation of abortion. Because Kansans value both women and children, the constitution of the state of Kansas does not require government funding of abortion and does not create or secure a right to abortion. To the extent permitted by the constitution of the United States, the people, through their elected state representatives and state senators, may pass laws regarding abortion, including, but not limited to, laws that account for circumstances of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, or circumstances of necessity to save the life of the mother.
The amendment is meant to correct an April 2019 decision by the Kansas Supreme Court, which asserted that the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights’ guarantee of “equal and inalienable natural rights” encompasses “a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, including the decision whether to continue her pregnancy.”
At the time, Kansans for Life executive director Mary Kay Culp called it the “broadest right to abortion in the country, effectively blocking “reasonable abortion regulations into law, including partial-birth, live dismemberment, and sex-selection abortion bans” and endangering “basic safety measures protecting the health of women at abortion clinics.”
In the following months, state pro-lifers set to work on a constitutional amendment to resolve the issue, a cause that took on new urgency in June when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, restoring the elected branches of government’s discretion to decide abortion policy.
But since well before the hotly-anticipated decision, pro-abortion activists have been working on a number of strategies to compensate, among them rooting the “right” to abortion in the prevailing interpretations of state constitutions, which would be unaffected by the loss of Roe. Pro-lifers in several states have pushed amendments similar to the Kansas one in response; Kentucky will vote on one in November, and efforts are underway in Iowa and Pennsylvania to get them on future ballots.
The issue also helps ensure that work and debate will continue over the prospect of banning abortion nationally. President Joe Biden has called for electing more Democrats to Congress to support codifying a “right” to abortion-on-demand in federal law.