BY: GRACE HILLS
Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Kansas women and their allies rallied Saturday at the Statehouse in support of candidates who value women’s rights.
Speakers emphasized the historic struggles women have gone through for rights — specifically with bodily autonomy.
Former Kansas Rep. and Topeka Mayor Joan Wagnon, now 84, recalled her time in high school where women would wear coat hangers on their sweaters to symbolize the back-alley abortion procedures that were common before Roe v. Wade. When Roe was instated, she remembers celebrating while protesters called her a “baby killer.”
“Every year that I was in the House, and every year since then, there has been stronger and more restrictive pushes on Roe,” Wagnon said. “That culminated in Kansas with a conservative majority,” and the placement of an anti-abortion constitutional amendment on the August 2022 ballot.
Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, voters in Kansas by an 18-point margin rejected the attempt to rewrite the Kansas Constitution, upending the political landscape.
Joining Wagnon at the rainy afternoon rally were Kansas Democratic Party chairwoman Jeanna Repass, Democratic congressional candidate Nancy Boyda, Democratic Kansas House candidates Alexis Simmons and Jade Pearson Ramsdell, and Kansas Coalition for Common Sense president Ashley All.
Their speeches repeatedly emphasized that Kansans are currently represented by a Legislature that fails to represent their interests. Repass said that even after Kansans voted to keep their right to abortion, Statehouse Republicans have passed bills to restrict that right.
“You are living currently under minority majority rule,” Repass said.
Repass said Kansans have a chance to change that this election. The Republican party currently holds a supermajority in the Legislature, which helped them override Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes seven times in the 2024 session. Three of those bills dealt with abortion.
House Bill 2749 requires medical facilities and providers to report the reasons for each abortion performed, based on an invasive questionnaire. Abortion providers challenged the law in court.
Kansas has a history of electing centrist female governors like Kathleen Sebelius and Kelly. Simmons, who is running in a Topeka district, sees a history of feminist representation across the state — which is why she believes breaking the supermajority is “absolutely critical.”
“We might have voted no, but a whole lot of people voted to keep the same representatives who tried to put that amendment on our ballot,” Simmons said. “So although we may have the right, it is not without the trauma. That’s why we have to show up on Tuesday.”
Simmons said the rally still would have happened if Joe Biden was the presidential candidate, but that she has noticed a shift in energy with Vice President Kamala Harris on the ticket. She said it’s given her hope.
A recent statewide survey that put Harris five percentage points behind former President Donald Trump, compared to the 14 percentage points Biden lost by, also has given candidates hope.
“I don’t think you can emphasize enough what the top of the ticket means for the rest of us down the ballot,” Simmons said.
Repass said she “wasn’t surprised at all” by the poll. She said Kansas is a state that wants change, and Harris reflects that.
“We have fought, we have marched for 100 years,” Wagnon said. “Because we have an election every two or four years, we’re going to keep doing that, because nothing is permanent in a political system.”