The next fight for reproductive freedom in this state focuses on the Kansas Supreme Court

U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, right, embraced Kansas Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes at an Aug. 2 primary election watch party in Overland Park. Davids won reelection to a third term Tuesday by defeating Republican Amanda Adkins. (Lily O'Shea Becker/Kansas Reflector)

In 2022, Kansas voters made history.

Just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Kansans rejected the anti-abortion “Value Them Both” amendment, becoming the first state to affirm reproductive freedom at the ballot box after the Dobbs decision.

Today, Kansas voters are being asked a very different question: whether to replace the merit-based process for selecting Kansas Supreme Court justices with one based on statewide judicial elections.

At first glance, these issues may seem unrelated. One concerns Kansans’ right to reproductive freedom. The other concerns judicial selection.

As a physician caring for patients in Kansas, I can see they are deeply connected.

After four years of medical training in Kansas, I left in 2020 to pursue advanced training in family planning and abortion care. During my fellowship, I traveled to California to receive clinical experience that wasn’t readily available here. I returned to Kansas in August 2022, just as Kansans rejected the anti-abortion amendment. Since then, I have worked at Comprehensive Health of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, treating patients whose ability to access care depends on the state’s constitutional protections.

Many Kansans understandably viewed the 2022 vote as the end of the story.

But it wasn’t.

When I started practicing in Kansas, one of the biggest hurdles patients faced was printing a medically unnecessary piece of paper, with the color and size of font mandated by law, 24 hours before their appointment. In October of 2023, a court blocked those laws as a result of the constitutional right voters affirmed in 2022. Now patients can access care they need the day they need it without any medically unnecessary delays.

This lawsuit — and the political restrictions on abortion that were blocked — reinforced a simple truth: constitutional rights do not enforce themselves. Courts do the enforcing.

That is why today’s debate over judicial selection matters.

Under Kansas’s current system, Supreme Court justices are selected through a merit-based process designed to insulate the judiciary from political influence. Voters will soon decide whether to replace that system with one that relies on money-driven elections.

The Kansas Supreme Court interprets the constitutional rights that affect every one of us. Its decisions shape issues ranging from education and elections to healthcare, government authority and individual liberty. Those decisions can have consequences for generations.

That includes reproductive freedom.

The connection is not hypothetical.

After the defeat of the 2022 anti-abortion amendment, Attorney General Kris Kobach publicly described changing the judicial selection process as “another path” for the anti-abortion movement. He argued it could eventually produce a Kansas Supreme Court willing to overturn the 2019 Hodes and Nauser decision recognizing constitutional protections for bodily autonomy.

We do not have to imagine what happens when those protections disappear.

Just last month, ProPublica told the story of Emily Waldorf, an Arkansas woman who developed devastating pregnancy complications but could not receive the care her doctors believed she needed because of her state’s abortion ban and the legal uncertainty it created. Instead, she was forced to travel by ambulance to Kansas, where she received medically necessary care that helped save her life.

As a physician, I don’t read Emily’s story as a political debate. I see a patient whose health was put at greater risk because the law interfered with medical judgment.

Emily was able to receive care in Kansas because our state took a different path after Dobbs. Constitutional protections upheld by Kansas courts have made our state a place where patients across the region can still turn when they are denied care at home.

That should not be taken for granted.

Kansans have already spoken about reproductive freedom. The question now is whether we will preserve the independent judicial system that protects the constitutional rights they chose to keep.