Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue (Antoine Doyen/Getty Images)
Growing up in Kansas in the Eighties, nobody could have convinced me that the state would one day become the protector of abortion rights in the Midwest. Traditionally a bright Red stronghold, Kansas has been the site of massive, and sometimes violent, anti-abortion protests. To me, it felt like the majority of Kansans longed for a time when Christianity controlled the state, when men had dominion over women’s lives, when political disagreements were settled with bloodshed. But now, in 2022, Kansas offers something unexpected: hope for pro-choice Americans.
If Roe v Wade is overturned, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft suggests it will be, abortion rights will again be decided on a state-by-state basis. Several states have legislation already waiting for such an opportunity to criminalise procuring, assisting with or providing an abortion. Doctors, patients and assistants would all be subject to heavy penalties and time in prison. Certain states, like Texas and Missouri, even want to make a crime out of crossing state lines to obtain an abortion where it is still legal.
But the demise of Roe v Wade has always been a question of not if but when. Democrats have used the language of abortion rights to attract votes and funds for decades, but they have time and again failed to pursue the legislative action that would codify those rights into law. Even with their majority in the House of Representatives and Senate, and a Democrat in the White House, it seems unlikely that any move will be made in this direction before the midterm elections in November. With abortion rights left in the hands of the courts, it was only a matter of time before the balance of power between Left and Right was reshuffled, and we ended up where we are now.
Which is why, paradoxically, I believe the only hope for reproductive rights in the United States is pro-choice Republicans.
To which a lot of East Coast Democrats might reply: is there any such thing? But I have seen my home state of Kansas shift from a place fiercely divided by the abortion debate to an unlikely safe haven of reproductive rights for the region — thanks to a handful of Kansas Republicans who have consistently broken with party leadership to keep abortion safe and legal.
It hasn’t been easy. Anti-abortion protestors have long been active Kansas, but in 1991, when I was a young teenager, the newly minted Operation Rescue upped the ante — guided by the slogan: “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder”. Responding to its organised campaign, Summer of Mercy, thousands of protestors descended on Wichita, Kansas, accusing the city’s most visible abortion doctor George Tiller of being a “baby killer”. They harassed clinic workers, patients, and pro-choice activists. The authorities, meanwhile, were remarkably hands-off. In fact, they were so courteous that the Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry praised the Wichita Police Department in the press.
The protests went on for six weeks, during which they dominated regional media and spread through smaller towns in the area. The animosity, and the rhetoric, escalated. Operation Rescue declared that it was waging a “Holy War” against a group of heathens who were undertaking a “holocaust of the unborn”. At the time, the divide between religion and politics was starting to disappear; Evangelicals swarmed to the Republican party. And during that Summer of Mercy, the Methodist church I attended as a teenager began to preach about the sin of homosexuality, the abomination of abortion, and the Satanic forces in Washington DC. Before that, we may have gotten some light “the man is the head of the household” nonsense, but it was mostly sermons about loving thy neighbour and the Good Samaritan.
When the out-of-state organisers left, the tension did not dissipate. Clinics in the region were subject to physical attacks and vandalism. In 1993 there was an assassination attempt on Dr. Tiller. He was shot five times. Hit only in the arms, he went back to work the next day. But another attempt, in 2009, killed him; the assassin, Scott Roeder, would claim to have been radicalised during the Summer of Mercy.
These extremists did not represent Kansans, and they did not represent Republicans. But just as Democrats exploit the language of abortion rights, Republican politicians were — and sometimes still are — liable to use the inflammatory “baby killer” language of Operation Rescue to secure votes and donations, in this case from their most extreme religious followers. (If someone shot a doctor or burned down a clinic, these politicians would then distance themselves by professing a belief in non-violent action.)
Unlike Democrats, though, those Republicans have been solidifying their rhetoric with law. The Midwest in particular has, in the last 20 years, introduced more and more restrictions to abortion rights, shutting down clinics with nonsense regulations and shrinking the window of time in which women can pursue terminations of their pregnancies. Oklahoma, just south of Kansas, had 18 abortion clinics in 1982, but that number has dwindled over the years down to three. The decline has mostly been because of nuisance laws that demand unnecessary standards in clinics when it comes to staffing, equipment and physical location. The state has also passed a series of onerous laws regarding the treatment of patients, like requiring information about clients to be entered in an online health registry and requiring patients be falsely informed that the foetus can feel pain during the procedure.
Meanwhile Kansas has, for the most part, held firm. True, the authorities passed a series of laws in the early Nineties requiring parental notification and mandatory 24-hour waiting times between consultation and procedure. But the state legislature did not follow its neighbours in increasing wait times up to 72 hours or passing “heartbeat” laws that outlaw abortion after the sixth or eighth gestational week. Several Kansan Republican legislators have attempted, repeatedly, to bring in such changes. But, despite the fact that Republicans have almost always had a majority in the legislature, these bills frequently die quietly in committee or get shelved until the legislative term expires. And they fail not because of Democratic grandstanding, but largely because pro-choice Republicans use the rules of the legislature wisely.
Clinics in Wichita and the Kansas City suburbs have therefore become regional magnets, providing services for women from Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska faced with increasingly unreasonable obstacles to care. Two years ago, the number of out-of-state women receiving care in Kansas clinics outnumbered the patients from within the state. And, in 2019, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that abortion rights are guaranteed in Kansas’s constitution.
Since that ruling, some state Republican legislators have fought for an amendment, but it has consistently been members of their own party who have blocked this action. In the latest attempt to amend the constitution, four Republicans broke ranks to vote against the measure: 84 votes were needed to put the amendment on the upcoming ballot, and they ultimately only got 80. And while none of them are attending pro-choice rallies wearing Planned Parenthood t-shirts, these Republicans are in line with the voters of Kansas, 86% of whom do not think abortion should be made strictly illegal.
This reflects the reality in America more broadly. While at most 30% of Americans affiliated with the Republican party would consider themselves to be pro-choice, around 40% believe abortion should be legal in most cases. And so the Republican party is long overdue a reckoning with its own constituency; by pandering to extremists, conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists, it has left millions of Americans essentially politically homeless. Any harsh moves to the far-Right on the abortion issue is likely to alienate even more voters, even if it delights the party’s Evangelical fringe. 70% of Texans, for instance, already think the laws restricting abortion access to the first six weeks of pregnancy are too harsh. Only a very small percentage of voters will be satisfied with the further expansion of state control over the private familial and sexual decisions of the citizenry.
If the Republican party were to govern according to the beliefs and wishes of its electorate, it would be consistently against the eradication of abortion rights. Instead, it is letting the radical margins hijack the abortion debate. If it really does seek a “national settlement of the abortion issue”, as Justice Samuel Alito claims to, the Republican party should look to Kansas, which provides a blueprint. The stereotypical pro-choice activist may baulk at the idea that such a conservative state in such a religious region has become a bulwark against the erasure of reproductive rights. But it’s hardly a surprising turn of events: the state has, after all, seen some of the bloodiest results of this political debate.
Jessa Crispin is the author of three books, most recently Why I Am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.
jessa_crispin 
This article is a perfect example of being unable to see your own biases. We hear about “pro-life extremists” that want to ban abortion. Why don’t we also hear about “pro-abortion extremists” that want to be able to partially deliver viable babies and sever their spinal cords before the head comes out?
According to a major poll that came out on Monday (before the leak): 60% of Americans believe Roe should be maintained. 50% believe abortion should be illegal after week 15. This is a logical impossibility, which means most Americans don’t seem to know a darn thing about Roe or abortion. It isn’t that important to them anyway; other surveys consistently place abortion in the bottom quarter of voters’ issue lists.
Fortunately, SCOTUS is a legal institution, so polls don’t matter much. Legally, Roe was screwed up law when it was passed. 50 years hasn’t improved its vintage. Locking the voters out of the abortion debate hasn’t diminished the political divide either. European voters established laws through the democratic process instead of having them forced on them by judicial fiat. Not surprisingly, abortion isn’t a significant issue there, and European laws (abortion largely banned after week 12) are similar to Texas
The only way to make this issue going away is to allow Americans to decide it through their elected representatives. And in a large, regionally pluralistic country, that will need to be done at the state level. Overturning Roe makes that possible, and finally lets us move on to real, broadly accepted, compromises.
60% of Americans believe Roe should be maintained. 50% believe abortion should be illegal after week 15. This is a logical impossibility,
Why is it a logical impossibilty – or am I being obtuse? The law says driving a car is legal, but not above 70mph, that owning a gun is legal, but not a machine gun, and that you can slap someone and get an oscar, but if you punch them you may go to jail.
The impossibly comes from the fact that Roe made any restriction on abortion nigh impossible.
Some of the 50% who would prefer abortion be illegal after week 15 also must have believed that Roe should be upheld, since at least 10% of respondents held both of those views. So effectively those people want two things that are directly opposed to reach other.
It would be like saying “I want national legalization of marijuana, but I think current federal drug regulations should not be changed.”
“the fact that Roe made any restriction on abortion nigh impossible”
On 18 April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law that banned abortions in the second trimester.
Who is confused?
The Gonzales v. Carhart case in 2007 in the Supreme Court upheld the 2003 federal partial birth abortion ban. This did not limit abortion, but merely the procedure of partially removing the fetus before killing it.—It was not a ban on abortion at any period of pregnancy, merely on an extreme type of abortion.
I think your description is misleading.
Your reasoning makes no sense. A person can easily feel that a current law is not exactly delineated in a way that reflects their values, but assume it is better than not having it at all.
The whole “the people aren’t too bright and need to be guided” tone is part of the problem.
And I love when authors use phrases like “pro-choice” and “anti-abortion” in the same article. Says a lot.
I know I’m being obtuse, but, if voters want abortion to be legal, why don’t they vote for state legislators who support it?
Because it is legal. (yup, you were being obtuse)
Ok, let me rephrase it, as my comments seems to have confused some people.
Abortion has been legal in the US for fifteen years, so really there was little-to-no need for pro-choice supporters to vote in support of it. Or put another way – with all the problems and issues that America, or a State has, why would a voter cast their ballot just because a candidate supports something that is already legal, and supported by SC precedent?
Or, did you actually mean: “if the SC votes down RvW, and some states then ban it, pro-choice voters in those states can just vote for pro-choice state legislator [so there is no problem]. Well, that’s also obtuse, for other reasons, chief among them, don’t expect people to be happy, to think there’s no problem, when they have a 50 year SC ruled right taken away from them. Especially where that right pertains to a medical procedure on one’s own body that is allowed in every developed country – and where the anti arguments are overwhelmingly religious. It might cause someone to snort at the claim that the US is the Land of the Free, or that the goverment follows the Constitution (in particular the 1st Amendment).
Democracy only works when leftist ideas become laws. When conservative ideas become laws, then we have a threat to democracy.
Because it is secondary or tertiary to other, more important issues: gun control, the economy, education, and so on.
Sounds reasonable. The author talked a lot, but I’m not sure she said very much.
While completely opposed to the author’s moral position on the issue of abortion, I think I agree that the end of Roe v. Wade will be good for American public life generally.
There are zealots on both sides of the issue. The state legislatures are far better suited than the courts to reconcile conflicting views and reach a compromise acceptable to most of their citizens. The extremists on either side will never be satisfied but they can be marginalized.