Does Kansas abortion rights vote offer lessons for Missouri in campaign to repeal ban?

As Missouri abortion rights groups mount a campaign to overturn the state’s near-total abortion ban through a statewide vote later this year, supporters are looking to Kansas as a model.

More than 17 months ago, Kansas became the first state to vote on abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Kansas’ vote affirmed a state Supreme Court decision that the state constitution protects the right to an abortion. Now, it could offer a pathway for the campaign in Missouri, the first state to ban the procedure through a trigger law that went into effect just moments after Roe fell.

“There are a lot of similarities in the electoral makeup of our states,” said Mallory Schwarz, the executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, part of the coalition to overturn the Missouri ban.

“The number one line is that Missourians, like Kansans already proved, don’t support bans on abortion.”

But a Missouri vote would pose a major test for both supporters and opponents.

Kansas voters in August 2022 rejected by 59% to 41% a measure that would have amended the Kansas Constitution to say it doesn’t include the right to an abortion. The Kansas Supreme Court in 2019 had ruled that the state constitution protected the right to terminate a pregnancy.

By contrast, the Missouri campaign will ask voters to vote yes to overturn a ban already in place in a state where access to surgical abortion had been whittled down to a single clinic in St. Louis even before the U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Opponents of the Missouri effort point to this difference, arguing that convincing voters to support a measure is different from persuading them to vote against one. Anti-abortion activists in Missouri will have to do a better job of highlighting their message through traditional media sources, said Sam Lee, a longtime anti-abortion lobbyist in Jefferson City.

“Just to keep at it, to not give up, not be discouraged by what happened in Kansas or Ohio or any other state,” Lee said of his message to anti-abortion activists in Missouri.

“We’re capable of communicating with the general public. We’re capable of communicating with voters. Sometimes we have to communicate differently than what we’re accustomed to.”

Across the country, voters have supported abortion access every time the issue has appeared on the ballot since the end of Roe v. Wade.

The Missouri effort, backed by the coalition Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, is still in its early stages and supporters face a tight May deadline to collect more than 170,000 signatures to get a measure on the ballot. A series of legal battles with Republican state officials kept the effort tied up in court for months. Missourians for Constitutional Freedom has reported raising more than $2.5 million since it publicly launched its campaign on Jan. 18.

The proposed Missouri amendment would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution but also give lawmakers leeway to regulate the procedure after fetal viability as defined by the amendment.

Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, which backed the Kansas effort, is now part of the push to overturn the ban in Missouri. Emily Wales, the organization’s president and CEO, said one of the key pieces of the Kansas vote that will help Missouri is sharing personal stories about people who have had abortions.

“For all their border wars, the people of Kansas and Missouri are not that different when it comes to wanting to protect their rights,” Wales said.

The chaotic and uncertain era for women and doctors ushered in by Missouri’s strict abortion ban was one of the motivating factors for abortion rights supporters in Kansas, Wales said. And now Missourians, she said, have a chance to access care that has been targeted for decades.

“This is an opportunity to say we’re not going to force people to flee to get access to care,” Wales said. “We’re going to get it as close to their homes as possible because that’s what people deserve.”

Kansas as a model

The Kansas vote arrived like a thunderclap.

The vote occurred just two months after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, with activism and public attention on abortion at a fever pitch as the country worked to understand the new abortion landscape.

The successful “vote no” campaign in Kansas in many ways became a model for subsequent campaigns to protect abortion rights elsewhere. Messaging in other abortion rights campaigns has often imitated Kansas’ focus on keeping government out of private health care decisions — a trend supporters expect to continue in Missouri.

The Kansas vote demonstrated that reproductive rights are not partisan, said Rachel Sweet, who ran the Kansas campaign and went on to run a successful campaign to protect abortion rights in Kentucky. Campaigns for abortion rights in conservative states must highlight the stories of people affected by strict bans, she said.

“This is not about what do Democrats think, what do Republicans think — it’s not a war of talking points,” Sweet said. “We can take some of that partisanship out of it and show people that this impacts people in their communities.”

Still, the Missouri campaign will look different than the Kansas effort, said Helena Buchmann, who was the field director for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom. Supporters face a very different status quo, are going through a different process to get on the ballot and will likely have more money than Kansas organizers did, she said.

But, she said, Missouri voters will also be aware of the gravity of abortion access and hold similar values to Kansans. Campaigners, she said, need to acknowledge the nuance and range of personal opinions on abortion.

“I think it’s very easy to think that you have the correct perspective on this but it’s a nuanced issue and so approaching every conversation with every voter from a non-judgmental perspective is important in all political organizing,” Buchmann said.

Missouri state Sen. Lauren Arthur, a Kansas City Democrat, wants elements of the Kansas campaign repeated in Missouri. Even voters in deep-red states will show up at the polls when their rights have been taken away, she said.

“It’s important to focus on the people harmed by the current ban, because there are really people in our state whose health and reproductive health has been put in jeopardy as a result of the ban,” she said.

In the wake of the ban, the number of women who have been forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term in Missouri remains unknown. But the closest clinics to Missouri – on the Kansas side of the Kansas City metro and on the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro – have been flooded with patients from states with bans on the procedure.

Missouri Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, an Independence Democrat, was blunt when asked what abortion right supporters can learn from the Kansas vote.

“The Republican Party is going to lose this,” Rizzo said.

Abortion rights campaigns face resistance

As in Kansas, abortion rights supporters in Missouri will face fierce resistance as a potential vote approaches.

Missouri abortion opponents have already launched the group Missouri Stands with Women to counter the amendment drive.

“What Missouri pro-life proponents need to do between now and the day we’re voting on this issue, we need to enthusiastically and happily defend the life of the unborn,” said Missouri state Rep. Doug Richey, an Excelsior Springs Republican.

“Answer questions, share stories and get engaged. That’s all we can do.”

Missouri Republican state lawmakers are also moving with fresh urgency to make it harder for voters to amend the state constitution.

Republicans have filed a slew of proposals this year that would overhaul the state’s century-old initiative petition process, hoping that raising the threshold for passing an amendment at a statewide vote could stymie the abortion rights campaign.

“Our angle would be to see that initiative petition is reformed in the state of Missouri, so that outside influence don’t have undue influence on our constitutional matters,” said Missouri state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Branson Republican, who contends the current process allows outside groups to influence statewide campaigns.

A group of hard-right state senators called the Missouri Freedom Caucus have vowed to hold up action in the Missouri Senate unless their colleagues agree to pass legislation to overhaul the process.

Another complication for the Missouri abortion rights ballot push is the emergence of a Republican-led campaign that would legalize abortion up to 12 weeks and add exceptions for rape and incest. Several abortion rights groups, health care providers and Democratic lawmakers remain skeptical of the Republican effort, arguing it would give lawmakers too much room to regulate reproductive health care.

In Kansas, anti-abortion advocates have consistently argued that the 2022 results did not necessarily prove Kansans support abortion rights.

Chuck Weber, a lobbyist for the Kansas Catholic Conference, said in a statement that Missourians should be prepared for “heavy dose of anti-Catholic bigotry, vandalized churches, harassment and intimidation” and “an influx of mega-donations to the abortion industry from out-of-state millionaires, billionaires and members of the Hollywood elite class.”

He added that “secular news reporting will serve as an echo chamber of messaging on behalf of the abortion industry.”

The Kansas Catholic Conference was a member of the Value Them Both Coalition which lead the campaign for the amendment. The other members were Kansas Family Voice, a Christian policy group, and Kansans for Life.

Polling conducted in 2022 by Saint Louis University and YouGov found that a majority of Missourians were in favor of some level of legal abortion, including a plurality of 48% who disagreed with the state’s ban on abortion.

For Brittany Jones, a lobbyist for Kansas Family Voice, a conservative Christian policy group, opponents of the Missouri abortion rights proposal need to focus on clarity of messaging as they prepare for a campaign later in the year.

“Opponents need to be able to respond to arguments in a clear manner and not use hyperbolic or “scary language,” Jones said. She said that the pro-amendment group delivered that messaging better sometimes than others but that Missourians could learn from their experience.

“We’re midwesterners. Talk to people straight,” Jones said.

With an abortion ban already in place, anti-abortion campaigners are dealing with more of a known reality in Missouri than in Kansas, Jones said.

The timing of Kansas’ vote in the months immediately following the Supreme Court decision made messaging difficult for proponents, Jones said. Campaigners in Missouri have the benefit of foresight, she said.

“Two years later people have had time to get their head kind of wrapped around what’s going on,” Jones said.

Attendees at Kansas’ annual March for Life at the Kansas Capitol on Wednesday urged Missourians to stay hopeful as the vote approaches.

“We have our work cut out for us but God will prevail,” said Lenora Kenzie of Topeka.

Laurie Wonnell, a McLouth resident who attended the march, said Missouri campaigners needed to focus on pushing back on arguments brought by abortion rights supporters. “What we didn’t do in Kansas is counter their arguments,” she said.

But for abortion rights supporters in Missouri, the campaign is a chance for Missourians to push back against a decades-long onslaught of anti-abortion attacks and government interference in their right to basic health care.

“Missourians for Constitutional Freedom is our opportunity to say we deserve more,” said Schwarz with Abortion Action Missouri. “Missourians deserve more and they are ready to overturn this abortion ban.”