by Devin McCue, Sumner Newscow — Kansas is in the national news this week because of our history-making vote on Tuesday to secure Kansan’s right to an abortion. Major media outlets in New England are furiously spitting out “even in Kansas some of those hayseeds have a brain cell or two” articles, but that’s just lazy journalism.

Kansas has always been a home for safe abortions in spite of what some people believe. A large part of our national political attention since the 1990s precisely is because of that issue. So, let’s look at that history and see why Tuesday’s vote shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone in the know.

Before colonization

When we’re talking about American history, people in the U.S. often forget that the vast majority of that history didn’t include the United States.

Indigenous tribes to Kansas included the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kansa, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee, and Wichita people, but it’s been home to many more. Some Native Americans were largely nomadic and the U.S. government used forced relocation to move many of the remaining tribes somewhere in Kansas and Oklahoma at one point in their histories.

Since abortion has been a common practice throughout all of world history, it won’t surprise you to know Native Americans used the practice as well. Native people used herbal medicines called abortifacients to induce abortions regularly, and one anthropologist called one of these plants a top-10 most commonly used medicinal drug in Native society.

Of course, Native Americans aren’t a monolith, and each tribe has and had its own beliefs and customs. It’s nearly impossible to nail down the specific history of Kansas’ own tribes, but because these herbs and practices were so replete across pre-colonial America, it’s safe to say Kansan tribes used them as well.

Homesteading

Once the young United States bought the Louisiana Purchase and sent Louis and Clark to explore it, Kansas was on the map. Louis and Clark called it “the great American desert,” so the government forcibly relocated millions of Native Americans there with the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the infamous Trail of Tears.

As mentioned above, abortions were common in those areas and not at all exclusive to indigenous people. Abortion was so common among Victorian Americans that Ben Franklin published his own recipe for an at-home abortifacient and 19th-century doctors estimated that one in every five pregnancies were terminated legally.

The Homestead Act of 1862 helped bring the first big wave of permanent (white) Kansan settlers. Homesteading was a truly brutal practice of living on a free plot of land for five years and enduring the Kansas weather and winds without trees. They built houses out of Bison crap, couldn’t grow crops for the first few years, and had an abundance of abortifacient plants around.

If you think they’d bring another mouth to feed in that situation, you’d be mistaken.

The State of Kansas

Kansas became a state on January 29, 1861, when President James Buchanan approved our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

That same Bill of Rights would become the basis of Kansas’ constitutional right to an abortion. That’s the reason the amendment voted on Tuesday would change the Constitution, not create a new law.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, some states started introducing abortion bans. They weren’t on a religious standing or a view that a fetus was somehow a person, however. It was because a team of (all male) doctors and legislators, led by Dr. Horatio Storer, wanted to halt the tide of Catholic immigrants’ out-populating white protestants in America.

Nearly the same theory white nationalists like Tucker Carlson use today.

Kansas never limited a person’s right to choose and resisted much of the racist ill-logic other states were engaged in. Kansas’ early history was extremely racially progressive *for the time* and didn’t see any issue with immigrants coming to a state in desperate need of people.

Political Turn

Even though this is a history of abortion in Kansas, it would be incomplete without the context of the national politics of 1970 – 1988.

Abortion was starting to become more aligned with religion, namely Catholics later Baptists would adopt, but the issue was by no means a political fissure. Most people still saw abortion as a personal view rather than a political party’s guiding thesis. Then, Richard Nixon won the presidency.

Nixon was a shrew politico and was the first Republican to run on an anti-choice platform. Some Republicans were anti-choice before that, sure, but it wasn’t a part of election strategy until the election of ’72. Regardless of what Nixon truly believed, he saw the abortion “issue” as a way to secure Catholic votes and carry the states he lost to Kennedy in 1960.

And he was right.

After that, abortion became a popular talking point of the Republican party, although still not embraced by everyone. They branded themselves as the “pro-family” party and saw limited success. Grassroots organizations (funded by the Catholic church) like the Right to Life Committee also sprang up around this time.

Then, Ronald Reagan made Christianity, Patriotism, and Republicanism mean the same thing.

I don’t have time to list all the destruction this shift created, but once Reagan became so overwhelmingly popular, Republicans saw his strategy at lawmaking as the only way to win. Somehow, tax cuts for the 1% and treating any quasi-religious take on an issue as guiding policy seemed like a good idea.

Since Kansas became a solidly reliable state for Republican presidents, we’ve been saddled with that strategy even though, as we saw on Tuesday, we don’t agree with some core tenants.

Summer of Mercy

The Summer of Mercy is instantly recognizable to any Kansan over the age of 40. It was a 46-day stretch in 1991 where anti-choice protesters marched on Wichita to protest abortion. More specifically they were there to protest Dr. George Tiller, but more on him in a moment.

The protest was organized by a Californian group called Operation Rescue who sent busloads of Christians from all over the nation to Wichita to disrupt operations at three women’s health centers. They mobbed doctors and prospective patients, threw themselves in front of cars, and chained themselves to buildings in mass to aggravate as many people as possible. It got so bad police had to arrest over 1,500 protestors by the end of the demonstrations.

George Tiller’s future attackers were either in attendance, on the donor books, or both.

George Tiller

George Tiller was the medical director at Women’s Healthcare Services in Wichita. The clinic offered a wide variety of procedures available to anyone who walked in, but one of those (at-times lifesaving) procedures were abortions.

Specifically, Dr. Tiller performed third-trimester abortions, when necessary. Tiller was originally going to be a dermatologist, but after his parents died, he heard a story about a woman dying from an illegal abortion and set up shop to prevent future deaths of nature. Providing healthcare like that would make him the target of a lot of violence.

His first brush with violent terrorism came in 1986 when his clinic was firebombed.

A few years later in 1993, a woman part of a Christian terrorist group named Army of God shot Tiller five times while he was in his car. The would-be assassin was arrested and convicted of first-degree attempted murder where she claimed there was nothing immoral about killing Dr. Tiller and listed another assassin as her personal hero.

It was later discovered that the same terrorist had firebombed 10 other clinics that provided abortions on the West coast. She was released from prison in 2018 and the attorney who helped put her there claims she was “completely unrehabilitated” and has the same goals she did in 1993.

One firebombing, 46 days of a national protest, and five shots in his body wasn’t enough punishment for former Fox News anchor and current accused sexual predator Bill O’Reilly. In the years leading up to George Tiller’s assassination, O’Reilly would air 28 episodes defaming Tiller and calling him “the baby murderer.”

During O’Reilly’s rants, he would call Dr. Tiller a savage and “killing babies willy nilly,” as well as launch accusations that Tiller was ultimately doomed on the Christian judgment day and downplayed the seriousness the issue warranted. After Tiller’s assassin mentioned that he watched O’Reilly’s segment, the now-podcaster refuted that he’d ever called Tiller a baby murderer in the first place.

Then, on May 31, 2009, George Tiller was fatally shot in the head during church by a radical Christian terrorist. The murderer was in contact with Operation Rescue’s Vice-President (the same group who organized Summer of Mercy) at the time and became a member of the Army of God.

Tiller’s clinic closed for one week in mourning then resumed operations. Following that, the George Tiller Memorial Abortion Fund was created to help lower-income people obtain abortions.

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Once Roe v. Wade fell, it was only a matter of time until a state voted to change abortion availability. And, from what you’ve read up until now, it might seem surprising that Kansas was the first to take the initiative.

That’s because the Kansas citizenry wasn’t behind the push, it was a few legislators and a huge outside financial boost of $3 million from the Catholic Church.

The first effort to change the Constitution was the “Value Them Both” amendment but died in the state congress. But, as stated above, the right to abortion is in the Kansas Bill of Rights. That means the Republican legislators (and their financial backers) only had two options:

1. Create a referendum so the people could decide
2. Change the constitution in a Primary vote in an off-election year, drastically reducing the number of people who would vote

They opted for the latter. By the way, the part it would change read thusly: “All men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That’s the part, legislators wanted to edit.

Sumner County’s representative Larry Alley voted against the proposition. On the other hand, Wellington’s representative in the state House, Bill Rhiley, voted for the act to change the constitution. Rhiley is running for re-election in November…unopposed.

Registered Kansas voters showed up on Tuesday to not only shoot this initiative down but overwhelmingly do so. We denounced this by 18 points. A double-digit smack down on an attack on abortion rights is just what we needed in the post-Roe world and I’m proud Kansas was the place to do it.

But, if you’ve been paying attention to our history, this shouldn’t be a surprise.

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