Kansas Abortion Vote Justifies Leaving the Issue to Voters, We Should’ve Done It Decades Ago

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour” program, New York Times columnist David Brooks said the abortion vote in Kansas is “voter vindication”, that if people have “real choices, as opposed to the extremes in state legislatures, most states, the great majority of states,” will end in the middle on abortion and said he wishes the issue of abortion had been left up to voters “for the past few decades.”

Brooks said: “[T]o me, it’s a justification of the voters, that we could – one of the problems with Roe vs. Wade did we take [the issue out of the hands of] the electors. But you look at what just happened in Kansas, you think, well, pretty sensible. And if we can sort that out to give people real choices, as opposed to the extremes in state legislatures, most states, the vast majority of states, are going to come out to where the polls suggest most Americans are, which is that middle ground, where it’s not forbidden to have an abortion, not for nine months, but somewhere in the middle. And so, to me, it’s a justification of democracy. And I – frankly, I wish we had done that for the last few decades.