Ohioans may feel as if they woke up in Kansas this morning.
It’s been a little over a year since out-of-state abortion lovers – including filmmaker Steven Spielberg – pumped millions of dollars into a successful effort to preserve legal child killing in the Kansas state constitution. Pro-lifers predicted that laws passed over the years to protect babies and their mothers would fall if the ballot referendum lost at the polls.
Those predictions are coming true.
Residents of Ohio can look to the experiences of their neighbor to the west if they want to know what will happen now that voters have decided in favor of inventing a right to abortion in the state constitution.
Prior to their vote in August 2022, Kansas pro-lifers warned that abortions would skyrocket in their state if a referendum aimed at keeping abortion out of the constitution failed. Both things have happened.
The referendum called Value Them Both lost by a margin of 60-40. And, according to Danielle Underwood, director of communications for Kansans for Life, abortions are on the rise – dramatically – since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022 and surrounding states began enacting meaningful protections for the unborn.
Figures released in June by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment showed the largest increase on record since the department began keeping count, with a total of 12,318 total abortions in 2022, including 616 live dismemberment abortions, 8,475 abortions on non-Kansas residents, and 7,339 chemical abortions. Out-of-state residents received twice as many abortions as Kansas women, and there was a 49 percent increase in abortions performed on minors.
But it gets worse. According to the pro-abortion organization We Count, Kansas is on target to hit 20,000 abortions in 2023.
“This is exactly what we predicted,” Ms. Underwood said.
To make matters even more dire for the unborn and their mothers, last week a county judge in Kansas acquiesced to the demands of Planned Parenthood and the Center for Reproductive Rights in blocking several long-standing and newly enacted state laws.
On hold until a trial in June 2024 is a law that compelled abortion sellers to provide mothers, in writing, with information regarding abortion alternatives, and another requirement that abortion businesses post on their website about abortion’s detrimental impact on breast cancer and premature birth. Abortion profiteers also now can disregard a law that called for them to provide information on abortion pill reversal, and women no longer have to wait 24 hours before an abortion.
“We knew they would go after the Women’s Right to Know Act,” Ms. Underwood said. “We expect parental notification to be next.”
As in Kansas, money flowed into pro-amendment coffers in Ohio from a variety of places, with abortion advocates raising $28 million and pro-lifers garnering $9.9 million in contributions. The money makes a huge difference in terms of how many people can be reached with a reliably misleading pro-abortion message.
Kentucky is another state that lost a pro-life ballot battle last year. Kentucky Right to Life Executive Director Addia Wuchner told Priests for Life that pro-lifers were outspent nearly 8 to 1 by abortion advocates, most of them from out of state.
With at least seven states considering ballot referendums in 2024, Ms. Wuchner had some advice for pro-lifers in those battlegrounds:
“We try to tell them, avoid them if you can because the amount of money that will come in – not just from your state but from around the country – is astronomical. And why there is so much hatred for an unborn child that people from Massachusetts, California, New York; individuals, and film producers like Steven Spielberg, would be willing to put money into a state to defeat a ballot initiative that has nothing to do with them, is heart-rending.”
This is the reality that greeted Ohio residents this morning.
LifeNews Note: Janet Morana is the executive director of Priests for Life and the co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. She is the author of Recall Abortion; Shockwaves: Abortion’s Wider Circle of Victims and Everything You Need to Know About Abortion – For Teens.
By Janet Morana