Kansas lawmakers could let needed abortion amendment die. Where are the conservatives?
A liberal Missouri friend was absolutely slack-jawed to hear it. Kansas? Not conservative? That just couldn’t be true. It simply didn’t square with her view of the knuckle-dragging she imagined going on just over the state line from her lake home.
Yet it’s truer and Kansas is bluer today than when I first made that assessment a few years ago — an opinion colored by the contrast between an upbringing in Kansas and years spent in the American southeast.
Consider: Whereas Georgia last year passed a bill, later blocked by a judge, outlawing most abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected — which can be as early as six weeks or less — Kansas now finds itself quite possibly incapable of regulating the procedure at all. That’s thanks to a Kansas Supreme Court ruling in April 2019 that found a heretofore undiscovered right to abortion — or “personal autonomy” — in the state constitution.
That puts the state’s every existing abortion restriction in legal jeopardy, which would make Kansas a frontier-town-style legal vacuum on the procedure. Is that such a good idea? Even manicures would boast more oversight than that.
“This created a Wild West of abortion,” says Brittany Jones, director of advocacy for the conservative Christian organization Family Policy Alliance of Kansas.
Amendment lacks only four more House votes
All of that could be changed with a constitutional amendment. But so far, the Republican-controlled, supposedly conservative House has been unable to join the Kansas Senate in passing an amendment, to be approved by voters later this year, to simply reinstate lawmakers’ ability to pass reasonable restrictions on abortion.
Absent some miracle on Thursday during the Legislature’s one-day rush to finish its coronavirus-shortened session — the amendment only needs four more votes to gain the two-thirds majority required, but that would be miraculous in a crowded single-day session — then we’ll get at least one year more of the Wild West.
Oh, and what makes that even more distressing is the other pesky little law — the law of unintended consequences. The court’s ruling declaring open season on the most innocent of life might just be used to protect the most guilty: Lawyers for those on death row are perversely petitioning the courts to use the newfound constitutional right to “autonomy” to overturn the state’s death penalty.
Attorneys for Kyle Trevor Flack — who fatally shot three adults and an 18-month-old girl near Ottawa in 2013, the toddler’s body found stuffed in a suitcase and floating in a creek — argue that the state would violate the poor dear’s “autonomy” by carrying out his court-ordered execution. Heaven forbid.
“Our forefathers enshrined a fundamental right to life for all Kansans,” his attorneys plead in a brief, inspired by the Kansas Supreme Court ruling that, interestingly enough, found that such a right to life does not attach to a fetus, not even a viable one.
Seems rather bad form, too, for a multiple murderer to be clinging to his own “fundamental right to life.” Seems like particularly bad law, as well.
Is House content to let abortion laws die?
The fetus’ fatal flaw, of course, is that, while it is a separate life, it isn’t yet an autonomous one — like, you know, a homicidal maniac is. Tough luck, kid.
So House members in the supposedly conservative state of Kansas are likely to adjourn Thursday not having even tried to save reasonable regulations on abortion such as a 2011 abortion facility licensing and inspection law, or to revive a healthy legislative debate over taxpayer funding of abortion or particular abortion methods. And the current ban on remote “telemedicine” abortions is now open to question, too.
“Other laws, such as parental involvement for minors, informed consent, and the ban on post-22-week abortions are all in effect, but are in serious danger of being struck down due to the Kansas Supreme Court’s ruling,” says Kansans for Life director of government relations Jeanne Gawdun.
I’m not arguing that abortions should be banned. But neither should this state be Dodge City. Surely there’s room for reasonable restrictions. The Kansas Supreme Court ruling doesn’t leave much if any room.
And now lawmakers seem content to leave abortion regulations on death row.
To be sure, amendment supporters have likely hurt their chances by pushing to schedule the public vote for the sparsely populated August primary, rather than the big November general election. It’s a cynical maneuver that speaks to a lack of confidence in Kansas voters.
Then again, if Kansas voters are anything like their House members, they’re not as conservative as advertised.
