Mark Gietzen, a prominent anti-abortion activist and president of the Kansas Republican Assembly, died in a plane crash in Nebraska on Tuesday evening.
Gietzen’s Cessna 172 crashed around 6 p.m. a few miles north and east of Chambers.
The Holt County Sheriff’s Office identified Gietzen as the pilot Wednesday afternoon in a written statement. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No one else was on the plane.
“The aircraft was identified as a 1963 Cessna 172. The aircraft had flown from Newton, Kansas and was enroute to North Dakota at the time of the crash,” the Holt County Sheriff’s Office said.
The cause of the crash is under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.
Gietzen, one of the nation’s leading anti-abortion activists, was instrumental in a Republican takeover of Kansas politics in the early 1990s in the wake of the “Summer of Mercy” clinic blockades in Wichita.
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Most recently, Gietzen spearheaded an effort to force a recount of the vote on the August 2022 “Value Them Both” amendment, the first statewide referendum on abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Kansas voters rejected the amendment, which said the state constitution did not include the right to an abortion and would have allowed lawmakers to impose further restrictions or a ban on the procedure. The recount confirmed the loss for the anti-abortion movement. Before the election, Gietzen filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab seeking to block the use of ballot drop boxes.
Harrison Ford was reminded of his near-fatal plane crash while filming ‘1923’ with Dame Helen Mirren.
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