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.
