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Kansas to U.S: Protect Abortion Rights

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has woken the pro-abortion majority, as conservative Kansas (!) just demonstrated yesterday

Micah Sifry
4 min readAug 3, 2022
Abortion rights advocates celebrating their victory last night in a Wichita, KS bar

According to Vote.org, a nonpartisan website that helps people register to vote, after the Supreme Court released its opinion in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, there was “a huge uptick in traffic to our website and on our voter tools. Nationally, we saw a 563 percent increase in registrations after the decision, compared to the week before.” Few noticed, though in early July the Kansas City Star’s Natalie Wallington reported that the jump was twice as big as that in Kansas, with the number of people registering 1038% bigger than the prior week. That is, more than ten times as many Kansans decided to register to vote in the week after the Dobbs decision compared to the week before it.

We now know that this was no fluke, since Kansas already had an upcoming ballot question charmingly called the Value Them Both Amendment on whether to remove statewide protection of abortion rights from the constitution scheduled for August 2nd. And yesterday, voters in Kansas resoundingly defeated the proposal by a margin of 59% to 41%. In a state that went for Donald Trump by 56% to 42% in 2020.

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Micah Sifry
Micah Sifry

Written by Micah Sifry

Co-founder Civic Hall. Publisher of The Connector newsletter (theconnector.substack.com)

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