The Not So Intelligent Kansas Women

My family recently took an I-70 Vacation—we explored places we haven’t been to before on either side of I-70 as it runs through Kansas. Frequently, we saw anti-abortion signs along the highway. Someone, apparently, believes he can influence others merely by supplying misinformation.

Unfortunately, he’s right. Loads of people in Kansas approve of a recent law that, disguised as an effort to “protect” pregnant women against violence—especially against the kind of violence that would injure or kill their unborn children—elevated fetuses from potential human beings to actual human being status from conception.

Why would so many Kansans approve of such a change—a change which, to most intelligent people, obviously is meant to be the wedge that could completely make abortion illegal again in the state of Kansas?

Most Kansans don’t know their history, especially not history that relates to women’s reproductive rights.

They probably have no idea that contraceptives didn’t even become legal for women, not even married women, to use until the late 1960s.

They probably have no idea that, because contraceptives were illegal and abortions were illegal, women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies did so in back alley or self-help style. They probably have no idea that the vast majority of women who had back alley abortions either became sterile for life or died.

In our town, women wrote into the newspaper in favor of this new bill because, as one woman seemed to tearfully write, they had miscarriages and mourned those losses everyday. The one woman never indicated that her loss was caused by violence, but her concerns over the unborn, potential human beings everywhere undoubtedly convinced others, like her, who either had had miscarriages or who had never been able to conceive that anything and everything should be done to protect those lives.

Forget the women who carry them….

Why should it be necessary for a state to enact such a law, if that state was already protecting its women adequately?

Such a question didn’t seem to enter the minds of the legislators who passed the bill, nor through many of the minds that elected them there.

In Kansas, a man who rapes a boy gets twice the prison sentence that a man who rapes a woman or girl gets. Our law makers couldn’t send a clearer message: males are more valuable than women (so they believe), and now fetuses are more important than the women who bear them.

In Kansas, women are no longer second class citizens; we’re third class, right behind the unborn.

Where are the women (and men) who will protest this violation of our rights? Where are the people in Kansas who Value Women?

I had almost given up hope that such people existed in Kansas, but had been heartened discovery, nearly a year ago now, when, among all the anti-abortion booths that tend to crowd the state fair, I discovered a booth with a banner that said, simply, “Trust Women.” Available at the table were petitions to sign to urge legislators to vote against the proposed laws to limit women’s rights to choose whether or not to be pregnant, as well as pins to wear that said, “Value Women.” Everyone in our fair going group put on a pin, and all the adults signed the petitions.

We weren’t successful in defeating this fool-em-into-believing-we-care legislation, but we did learn we are not alone.

There are intelligent women (and men) who want to ensure women’s rights, and help make abortion scarce, not illegal. There aren’t many of us. But we do exist.