Missouri and Arizona voters will decide abortion access in November

In less than 24 hours, two more states have joined a growing movement to let voters decide this November whether abortion should be a constitutional right where they live.

Advocates for reproductive health in Arizona and Missouri had their signature petitions certified this week by state officials, securing the issue on the ballot in places where access to abortion has been severely curtailed following the fall of Roe v. Wade.

Similar measures already are on the ballot this fall in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, New York and South Dakota.

The latest certifications – coming less than three months before Americans head to the polls – are expected to energize voters who support a woman’s access to abortion, who have turned out in droves over the last two years whenever a constitutional question was put before the electorate in both blue and red states.

If passed, the ballot measures in Arizona and Missouri would permit the procedure until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks, the point in a pregnancy when a fetus can survive outside the womb.

Polls show that a pronounced majority of voters want abortion to remain mostly legal in the United States and oppose strict bans. Citizen-led efforts to defend abortion have succeeded in all seven states where voters have ruled via ballot measure since the Supreme Court scrapped Roe in the summer of 2022.

Even GOP strongholds like Kansas have passed ballot measures enshrining the right to abortion, with center-right voters bristling at the idea of the government dictating what they view as a personal decision.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump – who claims credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe – has called on his party to pull back from demands for a national abortion ban, setting off public tangles with some of his conservative allies. Trump now says the issue should be left to the states.

In bright red Missouri, voters will choose between guaranteeing the right to abortion or effectively leaving the state’s near-total ban in place.

For organizers, the next steps are “voter persuasion and mobilization,” said Michelle Trupiano, executive director of the Missouri Family Health Council, a progressive nonprofit in Jefferson City.

The state’s ban has made pregnancy more dangerous for women who badly want children, Trupiano said Tuesday, a message activists are hoping to spread. As in other states with heavy restrictions, she said, doctors aren’t always sure when they can legally intervene to save a woman’s life.

“It has created an atmosphere of fear and confusion,” she said.

Abortion opponents slammed the ballot measure, warning that its passage would “end thousands of lives.”

“Missouri would become as radical as California in allowing horrific late-term abortions and forcing the taxpayer to fund them,” Sue Liebel, the Midwestern regional director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement.

In the national battleground state of Arizona – which currently outlaws abortion in most cases after 15 weeks – supporters gathered to applaud what they’ve achieved so far. Door-to-door activism fueled the effort that gathered 577,971 certified signatures, well above what they needed to secure the ballot initiative, they noted.

The announcement Monday that the proposed amendment would be on the November ballot followed a spring of legal whiplash. In April, the Arizona Supreme Court moved to uphold a Civil War-era ban allowing an abortion only to save a woman’s life.

Weeks later, the Republican-majority legislature voted to repeal that prohibition – a reversal that Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs swiftly signed.

Several more states still could join this surge by the fall, with Montana’s secretary of state up against an Aug. 22 deadline for certifying a ballot measure that would “expressly provide a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion.”

In Arkansas, proponents of abortion access sued after the state rejected the petitions submitted for a ballot measure to lessen a near-total ban on the procedure. The Arkansas Supreme Court is expected to rule soon.

And Nebraskans are waiting to learn whether they will be presented with two competing propositions on their ballots in November – one to enshrine a right to abortion in the state constitution and one for a constitutional amendment limiting abortion to the first trimester of pregnancy.

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Graphic: https://washingtonpost.com/documents/2f721216-6c86-4491-93e1-80f1eec424ea.pdf