Click your little red shoes together three times and Kansas joins Colorado to secure women’s reproductive rights. Colorado’s anti-women’s-reproductive-rights people failed to get enough signatures to put their anti-abortion initiative on the ballot. Kansas’s women blocked that state’s anti-abortion effort. It’s a Rocky Mountain Empire trend.

The polling on women’s reproductive rights is accurate, apparently. When put to a vote of all the people on an initiative, anti-abortion advocates lose by a lot. In Kansas, the vote was 59% to 41% against the measure to take the right to abortion out of their constitution.

On the other side, there’s Texas and Indiana that have radically changed abortion accessibility. These two states have gerrymandered Republican majorities in their legislatures. The political leadership of Texas, House Speaker Dade Phelan, Senate President Dan Patrick, Gov. Gregg Abbott, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, has turned the state into a women’s rights wasteland. That’s more than 14 million women without the most basic right women of child-bearing age must be able to exercise.

Indiana is arguably worse than Texas. Indiana’s Speaker of the House and Governor, Todd Huston and Eric Holcomb, led the anti-abortion fight along with Lt. Gov. Suzanne Crouch, who had to pound her gavel hard to manage the disruptions from unhappy women in the Senate gallery loudly expressing their displeasure.

Four million Hoosier women now do not have access to their most basic decisions on reproduction unless they are fifteen or younger, are victims of rape or incest, face a life-ending medical crisis, and are pregnant for no more than 12 weeks. For girls and women 16 and older, they have their right only if they are pregnant for no more than six weeks and are victims of rape or incest or face a life-ending medical crisis

If these two states put their anti-abortion laws to a vote of the people, they would go down, just as in Kansas and Colorado. The only route now for anti-abortion advocates is through gerrymandered Republican legislatures. That’s the path established by the Republican dominated United States Supreme Court first in its Rucho v. Common Cause 2019 ruling on political gerrymandering and most recently in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization on abortion.

Colorado and Kansas women shine a light on the political future of the nation. It’s not a future that some men, especially in the Republican party, will like. Thousands of women registered to vote in Kansas after the Dodds’ Supreme Court decision and the constitutional amendment to limit abortion was placed on the ballot. Thousands of newly registered women voted in the Kansas primary election to defeat the amendment.

In Colorado, the most recent voter registration numbers follow the Kansas trend. The Democrats show 243,275 more women registrations than men registrations. Republicans and Unaffiliated show a combined total of 158,643 more men registrations than women. These numbers put women Democrats at an advantage of 84,632. That’s why these anti-abortion initiatives fail in Colorado. That’s why women’s initiatives for child-care, family leave, sick leave and other policies favoring women’s rights and choices will take up more legislative space in Colorado and the nation’s future.

The entire political system in the state of Texas is now sitting on the heads of women, pushing down on them to bear children they may not want or be able to rear. Texas’s male political leaders don’t care that they’ve turned their female relatives and friends into second-class citizens.

Girls and women in Indiana who can have an abortion only if they’ve reported a rape or incest to police or face a medical crisis are dealing with horrors that men cannot conceive. It’s a travesty that will not hold.

If these male-dominated Republican legislatures continue down their path, women will rise up. They will turn on the men who want to rule their lives. They will use democracy at the ballot box to win their rights.

Will democracy survive?

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.