Hello and welcome to another episode of Weeds. I'm Libby Nelson, Policy Editor at Vox,

and today I'm joined by Rachel Cohen, Senior Policy Reporter at Vox.

Hey!

And Politics Reporter Nikola Reim.

Hello.

This week we're going to talk about a place near and dear to my heart, Kansas.

Kansas is where I spent the first 18 years of my life. It's the home of the best barbecue

in the country, and most important for our purposes. It is also the first date since the

fall of Roe vs. Wade to hold an election where voters weighed in on abortion.

What happened then surprised me and surprised a lot of people.

The pro-abortion right side won that election pretty decisively. Only 41% of voters favor

to constitutional amendment that would essentially allow the state's legislature to ban abortion

if it shows. And 59% of voters said no. That's a very high number in what's long been a

really red state. And it's gotten people wondering what it means for elections this fall and

beyond.

So Rachel, what was this Kansas amendment in the vote over it actually about?

Kansas, just for context, is a state that has a lot of abortion restrictions. Over the

last decade, they have passed many. They have mandatory waiting periods. They have mandatory

ultrasounds. You can't do it over telemedicine. There's limits on how late in a pregnancy,

you can get an abortion. And one of them that they passed in 2015 was a ban on a very common

secondary-mester abortion procedure called deletion and extraction or DNA. And so that specific

ban was challenging court. It went all the way up to the state Supreme Court. And in 2019,

...