New reporting from The Nation highlights the connection between the fight for reproductive freedom and anti-abortion advocates’ nation-wide attack on voters and democracy – two issues that will be key for voters in the 2024 elections.
“Given the number of pro-choice wins across the country, desperate anti-choice advocates know they can’t win democratically so they’ve resorted to disenfranchising voters and attempting to rig the system,” said Tiffany Muller, President of End Citizens United // Let America Vote. “It’s a losing playbook and one that we look forward to beating again in 2024.”
The Nation: The Contempt for Democracy Driving the Anti-Abortion Movement
Joan Walsh
12/19/23
Key points:
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In the wake of major abortion-rights victories in Michigan and Ohio, where majorities of voters enshrined abortion rights in the state constitutions, and in Kansas and Kentucky, where voters rejected efforts to remove or prevent abortion rights from being included in the state constitution, the anti-abortion movement is mounting an aggressive campaign against such vox populi measures.
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While many observers, including myself, have described Justice Samuel Alito’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade as returning the issue to the states […] what Alito specifically said was, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
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That’s why these right-wingers feel comfortable insisting abortion rights, or the lack thereof, should be left to state legislators, and not local voters.
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In states where pro-choice voters are preparing new initiatives, including Florida, Nevada and Arizona, local anti-abortion groups are mounting advertising campaigns, knocking on doors and holding rallies to urge their neighbors not to even sign petitions to put such measures on the ballot.
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In Missouri and Texas, conservative legislators are trying to raise the threshold at which such measures become law. Ohio conservatives tried that earlier this year and failed.
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Constitutional amendments to protect abortion are already on the ballots for 2024 in Maryland and New York, where they are expected to pass. Arizona, Nevada and Colorado are believed to have a good chance to get their initiatives on the ballot, and even pass them.
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Some conservative groups have argued that the remaining states that allow citizen-led ballot initiative processes – there are 23 – should get rid of them.
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The combative Students for Life is running hard against pro-choice voter referenda, with language straight out of the post-Civil War Reconstruction, blaming out of state “carpetbaggers” for coming in “to get out the vote for Democrats,” said Kristi Hamrick, the chief policy strategist for Students for Life.
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Taking a page from their “sidewalk counseling” outside abortion clinics, the Nebraska Catholic Conference along with Florida Catholic groups are urging its members to harass those collecting signatures and make it harder.
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Despite that tragic case of Texan Kate Cox—a pregnant mother with a fatally diseased fetus and pregnancy complications that could threaten her future fertility, who had to leave the state to get an abortion—Texas voters won’t be seeing a pro-choice initiative any time soon.
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But the anti-abortion movement has no qualms against using antidemocratic measures to fight rising support for abortion rights, and the pro-choice movement will have to keep upping its game in order to keep winning.
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