Kentucky moves toward sanity as it rejects amendment on abortion
On one of the most important electoral matters to ever come before this state, women and men of every stripe and political party came together to tell the state’s Republican supermajority that politicians cannot use the state Constitution to come between a woman and her doctor or tell them what decisions to make.
It is a huge victory for sanity, for women, for progress at a time when post-Dobbs, they all appeared to be moving backwards. It was a major brake on what often seems like an inexorable red domination of this state, and of parts of our country.
In some ways, it’s only symbolic. Kentucky won’t suddenly become a bastion of reproductive rights. But it means the door is cracked, rather than closed forever. The current laws on the books are draconian, but laws can change. It’s much, much harder to change the Constitution, as the apparent twin failure of Amendment 1 proved.
It means that we can start to understand better where we actually agree on this complicated matter. It’s interesting that former state representative Joe Fischer, one of the early architects of the anti-abortion movement in Kentucky, appears to have lost his race for the Kentucky Supreme Court. This gives the GOP a choice. It can double down, taking advantage of gerrymandered districts to reject the will of the majority to leave our current laws without exceptions for rape and incest. Or It can listen to the voters and come to a more rational stance. How this will affect the Kentucky Supreme Court, we will find out on Nov. 15 when the justices hear arguments in the trigger law case. It may mute the already deafening anti-choice pandering we see from gubernatorial candidates seeking to dethrone Gov. Andy Beshear.
Nationally, voters pushed back against the Dobbs decision as well. It looks as though the five state referendums on abortion — in Kentucky, Vermont, Michigan, Montana and California — came down in favor of reproductive rights.
The vote also puts Kentucky in the same national spotlight that shone on Kansas when it defeated a similar measure last summer. Credit is due one of the architects of the Kansas fight, Rachel Sweet, who joined with the state ACLU and Planned Parenthood to prove that people do not want the government involved in the most difficult and intimate decisions of their lives.
They were also helped by brave women who told their own stories of how complicated the issue of abortion really is, people like Leah Martin, whose doctors refused to end a pregnancy that would end in her baby’s death and threaten her life.
The win was of course cemented by progressive centers like Lexington and Louisville and college towns like Morehead and Bowling Green. But the issue also reached less predictable areas, such as the triad of what’s always been thought of as conservative Catholic counties like Campbell and Kenton in northern Kentucky or small, rural places like Harrison and Nicholas, where voters said they’d had enough. The vote was close statewide —5 percent — and it was close county by county, but it was enough.
That’s not to say that the national Democratic Party will suddenly take interest in races here, or find and field good candidates. But they should because this vote shows that certain issues can bring voters out of the woodwork. When we get more details about who and where the no votes came from, we’ll see how other unlikely electoral needles might be threaded.
What’s most interesting is in these polarized times, Kentuckians made their own decisions, regardless of party or politics. They eschewed straight party tickets — they elected many Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul in a landslide and yet denied the GOP its long-held wish to close every door to reproductive rights. Outside of gerrymandered districts, people do cleave to the moderate middle ground, which is where abortion policy needs to be. Kentucky voters are independent, they vote their conscience and that should please us above all else.
This story was originally published November 9, 2022 at 8:54 AM.
