When a vote was taken Tuesday night on a proposed amendment to the Kansas state constitution that would remove the express right to abortion, what was expected to be a tight race was instead shockingly one-sided: The amendment was overwhelmingly rejected, 59 percent to 41 percent.
Analysts were quick to frame the result as a setback for the anti-abortion movement, but activists and experts say it also represents a repudiation of the Catholic Church hierarchy, which poured huge sums of money into supporting the amendment’s passage. The vote may also hint at a growing backlash against the church’s involvement in the nation’s abortion debate — not least among Catholics themselves.
Kansas residents strongly reject the amendment aimed at limiting abortion rights
After the vote, Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, who publicly supported passage of the amendment, issued a statement Wednesday lamenting its failure.
“We have not been able to overcome the millions spent by the abortion industry to mislead Kansas residents about the amendment, nor the overwhelming bias of the secular press, whose failure to clearly report the true nature of the amendment has served to further the cause of the abortion industry Nauman writes.
However, Nauman’s archdiocese and other Catholic organizations also spent millions, representing the largest donor base for the pro-amendment umbrella group known as the Value Them Both campaign.
According to financial disclosures and media reports, the Archdiocese of Kansas City spent an estimated $2.45 million on the effort this year, with the Catholic dioceses of Wichita and Salina combined spending an additional $600,000 or more. Some individual Catholic parishes in the state pitched in, as did the Kansas Catholic Conference, an advocacy group affiliated with the state’s bishops, which reportedly spent $100,000. Separately, the conservative advocacy group CatholicVote has raised about $500,000 for the pro-amendment Do Right PAC, according to the Flatland news outlet.
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It remains to be seen which side raised or spent more money, though opponents of the amendment also enjoyed large donations from liberal groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America and the American Civil Liberties Union. But these mostly secular groups aren’t shying away from the faith: In one ad aired to Kansans, a woman talked about her opposition to the amendment from the perspective of a swing Catholic.
“We grew up Catholic, we didn’t talk about abortion,” says the woman. “But now it’s on the ballot and we can no longer ignore it.”
According to Natalia Imperatori-Lee, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Manhattan College, the ad probably better represents the views of the average Catholic than campaigns funded by bishops. The church officially condemns abortion, but U.S. Catholics, generally supportive of legal abortion, have become more liberal on the issue over time: According to a recent PRRI survey, the percentage of white Catholics who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases jumped from 53 percent in October 2010 to 64 percent by June of this year. The shift among Hispanic Catholics was even more dramatic, from 51 percent in 2010 to 75 percent in June.
“The bishops were so focused on the idol of abortion legislation that they failed to step back and see the complication of criminalizing abortion and what that means — especially for vulnerable, non-white, non-affluent communities,” Imperatori-Lee said. “If that’s what the bishops were going to do, if that was their plan for ‘post-Rowe” world, then the Catholics will be very disappointed.”
Chuck Weber, executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference, defended his group’s involvement in the Value Them Both campaign.
“I don’t apologize in the slightest for our advocacy,” he said in an interview.
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Weber lamented the heightened tension the abortion debate has caused in the state — abortion rights demonstrators were threatened with arrest and an Overland Park Catholic church was defaced — but pointed out that bishops have lobbied on issues other than abortion in the past. The conference, he said, was among those who urged state lawmakers this year to expand Medicaid coverage for new mothers from two months to 12 months. Weber also suggested that bishops would fund campaigns around such issues if they were put to a vote, as in the amendment referendum.
However, Weber admitted that efforts to convey his group’s broader program to ordinary Catholics had failed.
“I need to do a better job of letting people know that the issue of abortion is not really the focus of our advocacy at the state capitol or in Washington, D.C.,” he said.
One organization that financially missed the fight over the Kansas amendment was Catholics for Choice, which advocates for abortion access. The band didn’t spend money in Kansas in part because, according to frontman Jamie Manson, it didn’t need to.
“Yesterday’s vote in Kansas shows us the strength of people who support the choice of faith when confronted with the power, money and influence of the Catholic hierarchy,” Manson said in a statement.
She added: “I’m looking forward to more David vs. Goliath victories.”
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The underdog spirit in the Kansas battle was embodied by two Catholic nuns who wrote an anti-amendment letter published before the vote that amounted to an act of defiance against the local bishops.
“A church sign says: ‘Jesus believed in women. And we do,” the nuns’ letter reads. The sisters continued to bemoan the harm caused by restrictive abortion bans passed in other states, and noted that supporters of the amendment are primarily focusing resources on abortion bans rather than legislation that would help mothers who give birth to full-term babies. such as “health care, parental leave, Medicaid and other supports for poor women.
Kathleen Sebelius, a Catholic and former Kansas governor who served as secretary of health and human services in the Obama administration, praised the nuns’ letter, calling the sisters “brave.” Whether it had a broad impact or not, Sebelius said, it reminded her of when the nuns spoke out in favor of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, which defied the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ opposition to the bill and is believed to that paves the way for its final passage.
With this week’s vote, “I have no doubt at all that the statement from the Kansas nuns matters to women who follow what the church has been saying and what they’ve been promoting — and they listened to the nuns instead,” Sebelius said.
The Kansas vote suggests that the bishops, after winning a long-awaited Supreme Court victory overturning the Roe v. Wadenow it may be fighting uphill battles in many states, with uneven support from rank-and-file officials who would rather see them invest church money elsewhere.
“That money could do a lot of good — diapers and formula,” Imperatori-Lee said.
— Religious News Service
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