The referendum on abortion held last week in Kansas was the first occasion to take the temperature of American public opinion following the sentence Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the Supreme Court of the United States put an end to a period of almost half a century (inaugurated precisely by another ruling, Roe vs Wade, of the same judicial body) in which abortion was considered a constitutional right at the national level.
Promoted by the Catholic and evangelical churches of Kansas, and with the support of Republican legislators in the state Congress and Senate, the referendum aimed to introduce an amendment to the Kansas Constitution in order to “deconstitutionalize” the right to abortion .
The result was a huge disappointment for anti-abortionists: almost 59% of Kansas voters voted once morest the amendment, which is especially shocking considering that it is one of the most Republican states in the country: it does not vote a Democratic president since the 1964 election (and the last Democratic senator was elected in 1932!).
However, anyone who has had occasion to examine the polls published in the United States in recent years on the question of abortion knows that at least 30% of Republican voters are in favor of making it legal, so the attempt forcing the issue through a referendum with a particularly confusing question risked ending badly for pro-lifers, as it has in the end.
That does not mean, of course, that the anti-abortion groups are going to give their arm to twist (to go any further, a few days following the Kansas referendum, the Indiana state legislatures, with large Republican majorities, approved a new anti-abortion law that severely restricts the possibility that women in the State can obtain one, even in cases of rape or incest). The primary objective of the Republican Party since it was co-opted by evangelical groups in the late 1970s has been to make abortion illegal in as many states as possible, and nothing indicates that this will change in the near future. the near future.
Nor does the surprising referendum result mean that Kansas (or other Republican states) will magically become Democratic in the mid-term elections in November (or even in subsequent years). A pro-choice Republican voter may remain hostile to the Democrats for a number of reasons (inflation, Joe Biden’s supposedly weak foreign policy, Democrat identity politics, and so on). Furthermore, one of the rarely contradicted axioms in American politics is that midterm elections are often bad to disastrous for the president’s party.
But what can be concluded with certainty is that the revocation of Roe vs Wade by the Supreme Court is viewed with hostility by the vast majority of American voters (Kansas is a state 10 points more Republican than the national average), and that the question of abortion, which during the last half century of the state in which had been neutral to conservative, it will now be rather liberal-friendly, which will help them slightly when Republicans persist—as they will—in nominating extremist candidates for Congress and the Senate, who are anti-abortion in any circumstance.
Perhaps the most interesting question that arises now is: how will the federal Supreme Court react to the Kansas referendum and to the evident disavowal that its result supposes for the magistrates of the conservative majority? Will some of them move to the center and try to tacitly or explicitly correct the judgment Dobbs, similar to how his predecessors acted in 1937, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was overwhelmingly re-elected, following two years in which the Supreme Court had invalidated various rules passed by the Democratic House and Senate? Or will they stick to their guns?
The latter is more likely, since the current conservative majority on the high court was chosen specifically to end the constitutional right to abortion. The five magistrates who voted once morest abortion have a long history of decisions hostile to it, and it is difficult for the mere pressure of public opinion to be enough to alter their deepest convictions.
The United States, a country that was already strongly divided before the sentence Dobbs, It is going to suffer many years of fighting, particularly at the state level, over abortion, until the Democrats act as the Republicans have done for the last four decades and prioritize the appointment or election of justices (not just the US Supreme Court, but also to the different state Supreme Courts) with positions closer to those of the average citizen on this issue.
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