Kentucky race becomes the test case for abortion rights in post-Roe v Wade America

Westminster Avenue in a bougie suburb of Louisville, Kentucky; faux colonial houses, white porches and coach lamps, on orange-leaf-covered lawns running to the sidewalks, late afternoon light streaming through, four of us straggling down it, the “Protect Kentucky [Abortion] Access” canvassing group SE8, and at the tenth house we hit, it appeared as if Diana, our veteran member, 80+, shortcut white hair and Japanese print slacks, was going to kidnap a dog. It was a tiny hairy thing, and it had come flying out to greet us, ahead of its owner, a large woman lumbering out from the garage behind.

“Come on, boy, come on, little feller,” Diana had said, as it had leapt into her arms.

“Is this about politics?” said the woman, coming forward in grey sweatpants and a blue, well, sweat top.  “I don’t wanna talk about no politics,” she said.

“Let’s move on to th –” said Alli, canvassing co-ordinator, checking a house list on her phone. This is the standard procedure of these things, it’s a get-out-the-vote drive, not a mobile debating society. The danger of actually arguing with someone is that you’ll get the other side’s vote out, through sheer orneriness. 

Diana hadn’t gotten that memo. Or if she had, she’d ignored it. She let the dog go, but it stayed around her, licking her fingers.

“I just wanted to say a couple of things to you. The first is that amendment two would put the lives of thousands of Kentuckian women in danger…”

“Come here, Marmalade,” the woman said, now not able to walk away. She might have glanced nervously over at Diana’s battered car that we’d arrived in, which had bumper stickers going back to the Iraq War on the back. Was this blackmail?

“The other thing I want to say,” Diana continued, “yessss, gooooooood boy, is that they’ve put a weasel phrase about banning public funds for abortion. Well, there’s no provision for state public funds, there never has been, it’s a complete deception — go on, boy.” Diana shooed the dog off.

“Well, yes, I’ll think about it…” said the woman, pushing the dog inside with her toe. Diana smiled and rejoined us. Was Alli about to say something? It wouldn’t have mattered. The smile on Diana’s face said it all. Contact made. Argument made. Damn the rest. Quite possibly it’s a vote for the other side, but who the hell knows?

Who the hell knows anything about how politics works anymore? Here we were, out in the suburban nowhere of Louisville, a mid-size Midwest city of a million and a half, traipsing around to find six to a dozen votes if we’re lucky, to stop an anti-abortion “ballot measure”, one of the umpteen referendum questions put on US ballots each election. Amendment two is a pre-emptive strike. Its core clause asks you to affirm that: to protect human life, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.

In other words, its state Supreme Court couldn’t find the same implicit right to privacy that the federal Supreme Court found in the US Constitution, via Roe v Wade. It’s one of a number of such measures being offered, in the wake of the Supreme Court Dobbs decision, overturning Roe. But it’s of importance beyond others, because it’s a test as to whether total abortion bans can be defeated in solid Republican states. In the primary season in Kansas, a few months earlier, an early-run abortion ban measure had been roundly defeated, and they don’t get much more red-state than Kansas. It was a huge boost to the idea that the conservative vote could be split on this issue, mainly along gender lines. In the privacy of the ballot box, certain raw facts of life assert themselves. 

So Kentucky is now the test of whether the Kansas win was a one-off, or a more sustained and promising political division. Possibly a one-off, because the right was complacent and unprepared, so soon after Dobbs, and the left made it an imperative: win or lose, it was going to show there was resistance. Whether it would have won without the element of surprise is a hypothetical question, but you only get that piece of luck once. The right has got its forces out everywhere, in a half dozen different groups named on the “Yes/2” conjunction in various combinations, and it’s also modified its message. Now it’s targeting Joe Biden’s announcement that if he had control of Congress he would pursue the legal codification of a right to legal abortion.

The suggestion is this would legalise abortion on demand to term. It wouldn’t, even though a minority are arguing for that, but it would have a necessary provision for “life-of-mother” abortion to term. In a polity where Republicans are even arguing against “life of the mother” abortions, that’s enough for the right to make campaigns around. On these matters, hardcore progressives can underestimate just how provisional many people’s support for legal abortion is. You’ll be shocked to hear that American progressives can be a little blithe sometimes.

We got a great example of that when we met up at the canvassing focus, at a Starbucks at a mid-size mall nearby. Three teams of two, and I latched on to a team of two short-haired, sensible-shorts types to ask a few questions. It got rough immediately. “We work together, we’re physicians. Yes, I’m a Democrat. Why are you asking all these questions?”

“Well, erggh, journalist me, come a long way, big plane,” I sort of burbled. “This is a key political issue.”

“It’s not a political issue,” one pretty much snapped. “It’s a medical issue, a –“

“Well, yeah,” I said, adopting the grinning Aussie doofus pose, “but if the other side says it’s political, then you’ve got a fight.”

“We shouldn’t have to fight for it…” and by then we had recognised each other, ancient enemies, about the same age, repeating an argument had at uni house parties three decades back. I could all but hear the strains in the background of the fucking Indigo Girls. It became clear then that I would not be shadowing this team, and one prayed that they didn’t encounter voters who needed persuading, with an understanding of why some people might waver. 

“Well, we moved into a retirement home seven years ago, my husband and I,” Diana had said on the drive over. “And that gave me more time for activism.” As with all American canvassing, canvassing everywhere I guess, it was going to be a matter of a couple of short hops between areas identified as maximally disposed to vote “No” and minimally likely to be riled to vote “Yes”.

Now, we were all standing on another lawn, looking at a car with a cut-out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg stuck to the side back window — when you ride, you ride with RBG — and trying to work out which house it belonged to.

“I mean, you know, I voted Republican for a long time, but I really didn’t like it when, shoot, you know –“

“Bush?” I said.

“No, earlier.”

“Reagan?” said Alli, 27, dredging high school memory.

“No, Watergate… Nixon!”

“Wow,” Alli and I both went involuntarily. 

“It was Bush, Bush II, I really got involved over, when I became a pastor.”

“A pastor?”

“In the United Church of Christ, and then you couldn’t stop me.”  

Nixon, puritan pastors, Dubya. We were on a lawn with plastic glowing Halloween skulls pinned around its edges, and squirrels cavorting around the trees. It was all freaking me out a bit, Americana overload.

“When was your first campaign, Diana?”

“Oh, that would have been St Louis, in 1964, for…”

Don’t say Goldwater, I thought.

“…handicapped spaces for the hospital parking lot.”

“Then civil rights…”

“Yes! My church was going to have Martin Luther King speak, but…”

“What happened?”

She looked at me. We moved on. 

“Not this house,” said Alli.

“But it’s got a squirrel crossing,” I said. Someone had painted a sort of pedestrian crossing over the driveway serving four houses and put up a stop sign. It looked like adults, not kids, but not, like, official.  

Could that be? People looking out for squirrels, but not necessarily opposed to a total ban on abortion? The answer is yes. The most startling development of the anti-abortion “pro-life” movement has been the removal of the “life of the mother” exception. Until about a decade ago, everyone agreed with that, except the most extreme Christians, who suggested high-risk pregnant women should accept their fate.

The “incest and rape” exception went a while ago, on the grounds that if you believe the embryo/foetus to be a person with full rights, then why should it pay for the sins of others? The “life of the mother” exception started to be eroded in Republican primaries, as candidates bid for the votes of the religious right base, and was then rolled over into general campaigns. Then, in the era of COVID and “fake news”, there was a twist. Republicans began asserting that there was no need for a “life of the mother” exception because medical science had made every such complication curable.

It’s a line you hear more and more, the new orthodoxy, especially absurd given that the US has childbirth death rates far higher than the rest of the West, and for some groups such as Black women, developing nation levels. Forever larger parts of the anti-abortion movement, “life” has become a quality so abstracted and alienated from the people doing the actual living that it is prior to any actual manifestation of it. The demand for “life” as a sort of ultimate ground comes from a society breaking itself apart with a predatory capitalism, and an arising culture that turns every aspect of existence into anything but what it is: a haunting of the colonial suburb. 

I decided not to share these thoughts. Diana had latched on to a young man, at a door, holding a baby, who had already said he would be voting no, would campaign if he wasn’t a new father, wished us well.

“You gonna make sure you vote?”

“Well, yes, I’m very committed,” he said.

“Well, yes, but I know what it’s like with a baby, and I just want to know that you’re going to get along on Tuesday, or before and vote. You tell me yes ma’am.”

“Yes ma’am, I will vote,” he said, chastened and amused and chastened, and one felt a tiny movement, a tiny tremor, the action of politics, the transfer of duty. 

When I left, to find some sort of landmark among this endless swirl of colonialalia, the fake chimneys and repro rocking chairs, the raked fiery leaves, the dozens of yard signs for hundreds of candidates for judge, school board, council, like one vast cover of an easy-listening LP, Diana was telling someone else about the funding ban trick, “… and that’s not even possible to do!” “Yes, I’m voting no, I am.”

Diana knew how campaigning was done these days, she just didn’t give a damn. She was a walking half-century of protest, an example of the country’s better half and not above giving someone the slight sense she might hold their dog till they agreed to vote “No to 2”. More power to her, and to all who believe that politics is the movement of the spirit, the persuasion to justice, and there is no one beyond the call, as night started to fall, and on the porches, the coach lamps came on.