Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

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.

Organizers in Idaho, Nevada, and Virginia Are Putting Abortion Rights on Ballot

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........

© Truthout