Roger Marshall has spent little time talking about abortion in his re-election campaign. Kansas voters have made clear where they stand on it. So he hasn't said much.

Until Sunday. The 19th reports that at a faith-based public gathering in Wichita, Marshall shared the stage with some of the most extreme voices in the anti-abortion movement — and told them: "I don't know what I would put ahead of the sanctity of life."

Who he was standing with

According to The 19th, Marshall spoke alongside:

• Troy Newman, head of Operation Rescue. Newman moved the group to Wichita in 2002 to protest outside the clinic of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider who was murdered in 2009. Operation Rescue denounced Tiller's killer, Scott Roeder, at the time — but Roeder said he had met with Newman and owned an autographed copy of his book. The 19th describes Operation Rescue as an organization that "has promoted violence against abortion providers."
• Pastor Kyle Lammott, who called on the crowd to pray for "wives who are submissive" and said Kansas's abortion protections have left the state "soaked with the blood of the innocent."
• Pastor Con Howerton, who decried "babies, millions of them being sent to Molech" — a Bible reference to child sacrifice — and complained that Kansas had become "a destination state for abortion."

And another speaker compared aborted fetuses to the people killed at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where more than a million Jews and others were murdered.

Other speakers held up Marshall as a champion of their movement. Marshall didn't use their language himself. But he hasn't distanced himself from any of it, and his campaign did not answer The 19th's request for comment.

Kansas already answered this question

Marshall knows how Kansas feels about abortion. In 2022, Kansas voters rejected a ballot measure that would have stripped abortion protections from the state constitution. This August, they voted down another measure widely seen as a first step toward the same goal — this one to change how the state picks its Supreme Court justices.

A Times/Siena poll in October found only 3% of likely Kansas voters say abortion is their top issue. Those voters lean Republican. Ashley All, a Kansas strategist who helped defeat the 2022 measure, told The 19th that most Kansans want politicians to "stay out of it and stay out of their decisions."

"This is the most extreme segment of the Republican electorate they are trying to reach with this," she said.

That's who Marshall chose to spend a Sunday with, nine days before an election he could lose.

The doctor who sued his patients

Marshall is an OB-GYN, and he has made his years caring for women central to his political identity. His opponent, Adam Hamilton, has been reminding Kansans what that practice actually did: it sued more than 700 of its own patients over their bills, and 81 of them were arrested. One woman was sued over a $129 postpartum visit.

Hamilton is a Methodist megachurch pastor. He has said he personally struggles with abortion but believes it should be legal. Marshall's side has spent the race attacking Hamilton's faith — so much that 120 Kansas ministers wrote asking Marshall to stop. Now Marshall is closing alongside a pastor who describes abortion as sending babies to a pagan god.

What the record shows

Nine days before Election Day, Roger Marshall spoke at a Wichita event alongside the head of Operation Rescue and pastors who said Kansas was "soaked with the blood of the innocent" and sending babies "to Molech," while another speaker compared aborted fetuses to Auschwitz victims. Marshall told the crowd nothing comes ahead of "the sanctity of life," has not distanced himself from what was said, and did not answer questions about it. Kansans voted to protect abortion rights in 2022 and rejected another measure aimed at them this August.

Source

Roger Marshall closes campaign with men who compare abortion to human sacrifice, the Holocaust, Shefali Luthra, The 19th, October 29, 2026.