Abortion Rights Advocates Ride Ohio Win Toward 2024 Ballot Fight

Ohio’s decisive vote in favor of abortion rights will help advocates and opponents prepare for campaigns asking more voters to amend state constitutions to include the right to make decisions about reproduction.

New York and Maryland will be next to decide, with proposed constitutional amendments already securing places on next November’s ballots.

Other states, including Florida, could join them in 2024, merging an issue that’s been shown to motivate Democratic turnout into the dynamics of a presidential election year.

“The more victories you see in ballot initiatives, the more ballot initiative fights you’ll see initiated,” Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, said in an interview.

New York’s proposed Equal Protection of Law Amendment would prohibit discrimination based on “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy,” along with ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other factors.

Abortion is legal in New York through 24 weeks of pregnancy, and afterward in the event of a medical emergency. But, “without the backing of our State Constitution, politicians could roll back these fundamental rights any time,” said Emma Corbett, state director of communications at Planned Parenthood Empire State Acts.

Planned Parenthood has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg Government’s parent company.

Several state Republican lawmakers oppose the measure, as well as the New York State Catholic Conference. Kristen Curran, the group’s director of government relations, said in an email the quest for a constitutional amendment “serves no purpose other than providing political clout for those that support it.”

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The proposal on Maryland’s 2024 ballot would protect a “right to reproductive freedom,” including the ability to prevent, continue, or end their own pregnancy.

Like New York, Maryland state law already protects the right to abortion. Senate President Bill Ferguson (D) said at a press conference in February that “enshrining reproductive freedom in the Maryland Constitution is the right thing to do for future generations.”

Florida

Florida’s Supreme Court is reviewing that state’s 15-week abortion ban, and also is considering a request from Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) to review a proposed amendment that would prohibit restrictions on abortion before fetal viability—roughly 24 weeks of gestation.

The measure, which must obtain more than 890,000 signatures by February to get on the 2024 ballot, seeks to protect access to an abortion “when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” The amendment wouldn’t change the state’s requirement that a parent or guardian be notified before a minor has an abortion.

As of Nov. 1, petitioners had gathered nearly 492,000 signatures, according to Kara Gross, legislative director and senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Florida.

If the proposal makes it onto the ballot, it would need support from at least 60% of voters to be added to Florida’s constitution.

“The stakes could not be higher right now,” said Gross, citing the pending court decision on the 15-week limit, which could also trigger a six-week ban Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law earlier this year. If the court upholds the 15-week law, the state’s stricter measure would go into effect, prohibiting abortion beyond six weeks except in life-threatening emergencies. The law would permit the procedure up to 15 weeks in pregnancies involving rape or incest.

In a 2022 survey by the University of South Florida and Florida International University, 57% of Floridians polled said they disagreed with the US Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade and turning abortion policy over to the states.

Florida argued in an Oct. 30 brief that the amendment’s ballot summary is “misleading” and designed “to trick voters into freezing in place a legal framework that conceals the amendment’s potentially sweeping legal effects.”

Arizona

A coalition of reproductive health groups has begun trying to gather more than 380,000 voter signatures in Arizona, where a proposed amendment would establish a “fundamental right” to abortion before viability. The group Arizona for Abortion Access is working against a July 3 deadline to get the proposal on the 2024 ballot.

The Arizona Supreme Court is reviewing the state law that prohibits abortions beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy, as well as a near-total abortion ban that dates to the Civil War-era.

The Indivisible Project, which helped push for the abortion rights amendment in Ohio, said it’s “taking notes” and looking ahead “to Arizona and so many other battlegrounds where voters will be the firewall for our democracy,” Mari Urbina, the group’s managing director, said in an emailed statement Tuesday.

Anti-abortion groups in the state are preparing, too. They’re getting ready to “show that the proposed ballot initiative eliminates common sense guardrails for abortion for the health of girls and women,” Cathi Herrod, president of the conservative Center for Arizona Policy Action, said in an interview.

Missouri

Abortion rights foes turned to the courts to try to keep a proposed constitutional “right to reproductive freedom” off Missouri’s 2024 ballots.

Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (R) has said he plans to appeal a ruling against a Republican-written summary of the measure. That description would have instructed voters that changing the constitution would permit “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth.”

Abortion rights foes won a similar argument over wording in Ohio, where the ballot language included four instances of the phrase “unborn child.”

Constitutional amendment proposals also are at various stages of the petitioning process in South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, and Nevada.

Ohio could end up back on that list, as well. Tuesday’s vote there “is really just the beginning of a revolving door of ballot campaigns to repeal or replace Issue 1,” said Ohio Senate President Matt Huffman (R).