Why Kansas' Abortion Vote Gives Hope to Black Women

Kansas resoundingly chose to preserve abortion rights last month, defeating a ballot measure that would have allowed its legislature to further restrict or ban the procedure.

The deeply conservative state was the first to put abortion on the ballot after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in late June. The result was a massive victory for Black women living in Kansas, Linda Goler Blount, the president and CEO of the nonprofit Black Women's Health Imperative, told Newsweek.

Black women are disproportionately harmed by abortion bans, advocates have long warned and predominantly live in the Southern states with the most restrictive laws.

Black women in the United States are already three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC cites variation in quality healthcare, underlying chronic conditions, structural racism and implicit bias among factors that contribute to the disparities.

Blount noted that a recent Duke University study found abortion bans would impact Black women most. The bans would impact Black maternal deaths by 33 percent, and the overall maternal mortality rate by 21 percent, according to the study.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder said in a study from June that in the first year after a nationwide abortion ban, the number of maternal deaths would increase by 13 percent and then by 24 percent in subsequent years.

For Black women, the expected increase if abortion were banned in every state jumped from 18 percent to 39 percent.

"The data is clear," Blount said. "You're talking about a 33 percent increase in Black maternal mortality and a 21 percent increase in overall mortality. That is abominable. When we look at Southern states, we look at Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, it's actually higher. So for Black women, depending on the state, it can be close to a 40 percent increase in maternal mortality."

The movement to preserve abortion rights is one that is working to "save women's lives, save the lives of Black women and low-income women," Blount added. "I'm hopeful that this is going to be a huge galvanizing, motivating factor for people to register to vote. If it could happen in Kansas, it can happen anywhere."

A Michigan elections board on Wednesday rejected putting an abortion rights referendum on the November ballot after two Republican board members voted against it. The decision could still be overturned by the courts.

But abortion policies will be on the ballot in several states in November, with some seeking to enshrine reproductive rights into the state constitution to others looking to declare there is no state constitutional right to an abortion.

Marcela Howell, the president and CEO of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda, told Newsweek that the result in Kansas shows it is a "winning issue."

"This is an issue that makes people cross party lines. It's an issue that turns people out," Howell told Newsweek.

The issue has also swayed votes in special elections for Congress, with Democrat Pat Ryan successfully campaigning on the issue in a battleground district in New York.

"We can either just throw up our hands and say, well, it's gonna take us 10 to 15 years to change a state legislature or we can look at it a little differently and say, is it possible to do a proactive ballot measure? We can look at some of these states that have the potential. Georgia is one of them. Pennsylvania is one of them," Howell said.

The victory in Kansas—by a 59-41 margin—showed that Republicans, Democrats and the unaffiliated voted in support of abortion rights, she said. Analysis by The New York Times estimated that about 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject a similar initiative to restrict abortion rights, including in more than 40 of the 50 states.

"I think we will see more of these kinds of instances, maybe not quite as resounding as Kansas, but I think we're going to see what we're already calling it the Kansas effect," Blount said.

Howell said polling conducted by her organization found that Black voters have been energized to vote in the November midterms since Roe's demise.

The Kansas vote proved that "voting does matter," she said. "That you can change some things by voting. That, I think, if nothing else has moved people to say maybe I should come out and vote in the midterm, maybe there's really something here."