An upcoming Kansas vote on abortion rights will be closely watched as the first chance for voters to weigh in on abortion at the ballot box since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling reversing Roe v. Wade. The vote, which will decide whether to amend the state constitution, comes at a time when many states are considering the question of constitutional protections for abortion.

The election on August 2 has become a national flashpoint for the abortion debate, with money flowing to both sides from donors around the country, raising echoes of when Kansas found itself at the center of the slavery question in the 1850s.

At the time, the Kansas Territory was allowed to exercise “popular sovereignty” to determine whether it would allow slavery after its admission to the union, a move spearheaded by a Democratic senator of Illinois, Stephen Douglas. Abolitionist and pro-slavery militants from around the country descended on the state and fought bloody skirmishes in the hopes of influencing the vote’s outcome.

The amendment that Kansans will vote on next month would specify that “nothing in the state constitution creates a right to abortion or requires government funding for abortion and that the state legislature has the authority to pass laws regarding abortion.”

Should the amendment — nicknamed the “Value Them Both Amendment,” referring to mothers and the unborn — pass, it would effectively undo a prior state supreme court precedent.

In 2019, Kansas’s high court ruled that “the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights protects all Kansans’ natural right of personal autonomy,” which “includes the right to control one’s own body, to assert bodily integrity, and to exercise self-determination,” and determine “whether to continue a pregnancy.”

The language of the proposed amendment was approved by the Kansas legislature — which has Republican supermajorities in both houses — in January.  It was the second attempt by Republicans to pass such an amendment after failing to reach two-thirds support in 2019.

“This amendment will protect bipartisan, common sense limits on the abortion industry that have been enacted in Kansas over the last 25 years,” the anti-abortion Value Them Both PAC, which lobbied for the amendment, said in a statement following last month’s overturning of Roe.

A group that favors abortion rights, Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, is leading the campaign against the proposed amendment and has questioned the timing of the vote.

“Republicans in the legislature intentionally put this amendment on the August primary ballot, instead of the General Election in November,” a spokeswoman for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, Ashley All, told the Sun. 

She said Kansas’s Republican primaries are typically more competitive, leading more Republican voters to go to the polls.

Kansas has a closed primary system, meaning that only voters registered with a party can vote in that party’s primaries. Ms. All argued that unaffiliated voters, who usually do not vote in primaries, may be less likely to show up for the August vote.

The Kansas Republican Party and Value Them Both, which is leading the campaign for the amendment, did not immediately respond when asked whether the timing of the vote was intended to prevent unaffiliated voters from showing up at the polls. 

Data aggregated from a series of polls by the Washington Post in June showed that 54 percent of Kansans support legal abortion in “all or most cases.”

A professor of political science at Kansas State University, Nathaniel Birkhead, told the Sun that the tenor of the campaign has changed since the amendment process began.

“If you had asked me to wager, say eight or nine months ago, I would have said that this would have gone through pretty easily,” Mr. Birkhead said.  

“Now we have these countervailing factors. The people who oppose abortion — not a majority, but a strong minority — have been very active in Kansas politics for a long time…. The pro-choice group are larger in number, but not as active. The Dobbs decision has kind of been a catalyst for them,” he added.

“If you drive down the street, you will see an equal number of ‘Value Them Both’ signs and ‘Vote NO’ signs,” he said.

Value Them Both is “extremely disciplined,” with “their stickers, their message, the colors, and the graphics on their signs all perfectly coordinated,” the chairman of social sciences at Emporia State College, Michael Smith, told the Sun.

The opposition, Mr. Smith said, is a coalition of groups and has “about five different messages,” though their signs all say “Vote NO.”

In preparation for the vote, both sides have been flush with cash from out of state, according to financial reports filed with the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission.

Value Them Both raised more than $1.2 million in donations — largely from Catholic organizations — in 2021, the Shawnee Mission Post reported. Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, meanwhile, raised more than $461,000 last year, with major donations from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Trust Women Foundation, and Planned Parenthood.

A report from the state Ethics Commission on fundraising in 2022 will become available on July 18 and indicate the extent to which those donations have risen as abortion has moved to the forefront of the national political discussion.

August’s vote on abortion has not turned Kansas into anything resembling the slaughterhouse it became after 1854. The national focus on Kansas, however, has once again turned the state into a bellwether for the national mood on one of the most heated issues in American life.