We've said it before. Women will not go back. Nor will plenty of men. Kansas just proved it.
In January, in a conservative state where the majority of Republican state lawmakers put a state constitutional amendment on the ballot that would open a path to stripping abortion rights there, lawmakers thought the proposition couldn't possibly lose. Especially since they stacked the deck, putting the amendment on the August primary ballot - an election in which few people vote, and those who do are typically Republicans.
But the gambit did lose. In fact, it lost big: About 60% of voters wanted to maintain the abortion protections in the Kansas constitution, compared with about 40% who wanted to remove the constitutional right to abortion from the state constitution.
Turnout for Tuesday's primary election far exceeded other contests in recent years. The Associated Press estimates that nearly 909,000 Kansans voted - nearly twice as many as the 473,438 who turned out in the 2018 primary election.
No, we won't go back. And we're tired of being bullied and fed up with being ignored.
The Kansas vote speaks volumes. As President Biden said when the Kansas vote became clear: "[Republicans] don't have a clue about the power of American women. Last night in Congress and Kansas, they found out."
The vote should speak volumes to all of us - even to the state lawmakers in super-red Tennessee and Georgia, where our leaders have continued bucking polls that consistently show the public believes that Roe v. Wade's establishment of legalized abortion was the right decision. Last year, even before the Supreme Court's despicable overturn of Roe, surveyors reported that 59% of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And in Tennessee, even in 2019, 51% of us told Vanderbilt pollsters that Roe was right; 42% said it was not.
Tennessee's anti-abortion crowd led a wave of red states' efforts to preempt state constitutional protections.
In 2014, our lawmakers pushed Amendment 1 to explicitly bar a right to an abortion in Tennessee - a right that had been protected in 1999 by the Tennessee Supreme Court.
And in 2019, our lawmakers enacted a so-called "trigger law" that would bring a near-total abortion ban to Tennessee should Roe v. Wade fall. That trigger law will go into effect Aug. 25, state Attorney General Herbert Slatery said last month, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24.
That near-total ban makes the act of providing abortion services a felony unless it is to save the life of the woman or prevent irreversible harm to her. Even in those instances, the law places the burden of proving the procedure was legal on the medical provider - as opposed to requiring a prosecutor to prove it was prohibited. And a woman's mental health cannot be taken into account.
Physicians who are convicted face prison terms of three to 15 years. The women cannot be charged.
And it's not like Tennessee didn't erect other roadblocks: A 48-hour waiting period, mandatory counseling, a bar on the state's Affordable Care Act insurance coverage, a bar against telemedicine for medication abortions, a requirement that a woman undergo and see an ultrasound, a requirement that fetal remains be buried or cremated and a ban on abortions for sex or race selection or due to a genetic anomaly.
But what the Kansas vote also shows us - and should show our politicians everywhere - is that it's not too late. On anything.
Women, their children and the men who love them are a force - when they vote.
And not just in Democratic areas.
In Kansas, where Trump won in 2020 by just under 15 percentage points, abortion opponents did surprisingly poorly even in the reddest places. According to a New York Times election numbers analysis, "from the bluest counties to the reddest ones, abortion rights performed better than Mr. Biden, and opposition to abortion performed worse than Mr. Trump."
What's more, the massive Kansas voter turnout wasn't just about women coming to the polls, but also about younger voters becoming engaged.
"Younger Kansans, who until now had little interest in state politics, came out in droves for this election," wrote Dion Lefler, a columnist for the Wichita Eagle.
On the whole, the Kansas abortion vote has prompted Democrats especially to look now to capitalize on what is clearly strong voter anger.
"It is time to reevaluate the conventional wisdom about the midterms after this vote in Kansas," wrote Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, on Twitter. "People are mad as hell at having their rights taken away."
You think? Yes, we're mad as you-know-what. It's time for a sea change, and women and younger voters are going to lead it.
We will not go back. Not on abortion, not on voting rights, not on civil rights, not on health care access, not on education. And we will go forward on climate. Get sensible, GOP. Or go home.