"Cultural conservatives and the hard right will rue the day when Dobb's massive over- reach to punish women and put them in their place vis-a-vis the heteropatriarchal order of things, became the proverbial law of the land.
The fight for women's abortion rights and bodily autonomy has shifted to a new battlespace--one that is divided between Handmaid Red-States, Abortion Rights Blue States and Contested Purple States that could go either way. We are now engaged in a conflict of Sectional Warfare.
Contested Purple States like Michigan, Kansas, Virginia, and Montana in some respects are reminiscent of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, where the territories' settlers would decide the issue of slavery. These states will become critical battlegrounds in the Abortion Wars. Resources, human and financial are going to be surged into these states on both sides of the issue to move the needle."
Erasing Roe: The Dobbs Decision and Sectional Warfare
and the Women's Revolution to Come
New Black Nationalist Network - June 26, 2022
Hate to say we told you so! Well actually we don't. When New Black Nationalists said on June 26, 2022, that "Cultural Conservatives and the hard right would rue the day Dobbs was adopted as the proverbial law of the land," Tuesday night's crushing victory to uphold the state constitution's protection of abortion rights comes as no surprise to us.
As we go to print at midnight, with 98% of the statewide vote in Kansas counted, the "No" or rather the "Hell No" vote to uphold the Kansas State Constitution providing abortion rights protections was winning by a 59% to 41% margin. This stunning rebuke of the far-right Supreme Court's attempt to make women's bodies and personal autonomy the property of "church and state" comes in a state in which 44% of registered voters are Republicans, 30.1% are Unaffiliated, and only 25.6% are Democrats.
Just as the Supreme Court and Republican's underestimated the fury Dobbs would unleash among women, the Kansas Republican-controlled legislature authored the seeds of its own destruction. They slipped this statewide referendum on a primary ballot in the summer when the odds favored a low turnout, with a predominantly Republican electorate.
Instead, with temperatures reaching 99 degrees in Kansas City, voting lines were so long that the Secretary of State sent out Tweets telling voters to stay in line when the polls closed to cast their ballots. Some counties were reporting 2008 Obama record presidential level turnout.
Instead of the Kansas primaries being restricted to Democratic and Republican voters, the statewide referendum allowed Unaffiliated voters who make up almost one-third of the electorate to enter the political fray. They came out big. In the New Black Nationalist Network June 26 statement, we said contested states like Kansas, "will become critical battlegrounds in the Abortion Wars. Resources, human and financial are going to be surged into these states on both sides of the issue to move the needle."
Republican and conservatives in Red States thought they had the momentum and would outraise pro-abortion rights forces and win the ground war. It didn't happen. The anti-abortion 'Value Them Both' coalition, reportedly raised $4.7 million this year. Over half of the donations came from anti-abortion Catholic organizations with the Archdiocese of Kansas City contributing $2.5 million.
But the pro-abortion group Kansans for Constitutional Freedom answered them dollar-for-dollar and more by raising $6,542,900 in the same period. Furthermore, pro-abortion rights volunteers unleashed a furious door-to-door grassroot campaign to turn out the vote out. Record breaking turnout doesn't just happen by accident or mystical force of a wave election without doing the work on the ground. Pro-abortion rights forces won that battle.
Voter registration was up by over one thousand percent. That's off the charts. Pro-abortion rights forces also won the information versus dis-information war. They turned back anti-abortion forces last minute statewide text message barrage to trick pro-abortion right voters into voting yes to gut abortion protection and turn them over to the state legislature.
In our view the Kansas Quake was not the result of a Democratic Party strategy or plan. As we said in our June 26, 2022, statement on the Abortion Wars, the Democrats didn't have a strategy or a plan. They still don't. What happened in Kansas was the victory of pro-Abortion women led organizations that are taking responsibility for winning their own reproductive rights and freedom.
This was also not a clean-cut victory of pro-abortion forces over anti-abortion forces. If it can be characterized as a pro-Roe victory with all its shades of gray. The intense person-to-person debates swirling around the science and emotion embedded in the reproductive rights struggle was contested with nuance and brio in those gray contested spaces. And at the end of the day, whether women had the right to make those decisions in their own interests and the interest of their families won the day.
Since Justice Samuel Alito's first draft of the Dobbs opinion surfaced, Kansans have peered across its borders with Missouri and Oklahoma--two Republican dominated states competing to adopt the most mean-spirited and restrictive anti-abortion laws in America Empire. They have seen what the future looks like in a post-Dobbs dystopian world for women, and they have rejected it root and branch.
A new phase of the Abortion Wars warfare has begun.
