When it comes to abortion rights, Republicans have become the dog that caught the car.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade two years ago achieved a decades-long dream for the Republican Party, which has put restricting abortion rights at the top of its agenda. But it has come with a major political cost. Undoing Roe’s protections has proven deeply unpopular, providing a lift for Democrats in races up and down the ballot.
Reproductive rights have also proven a winning issue when put directly to voters. As readers of this blog know, signatures are currently being gathered to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would reverse Arkansas’s abortion ban. If passed, the amendment would not allow the state to “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion services within 18 weeks of fertilization.” Those protections would also be extended beyond 18 weeks in cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies or “to protect a pregnant female’s life or to protect a pregnant female from a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury.”
According to the health policy nonprofit KFF, at least four states will have a measure on the ballot this November to enshrine abortion rights in some form. In another six, including Arkansas, organizers are in the process of collecting signatures or have already submitted signatures and are awaiting approval.
Arkansas will be one of the toughest battlegrounds for abortions rights activists. It has become one of the most right-wing, dead-red states in the country, and voters have consistently elected virulently anti-abortion lawmakers in recent years.
The Associated Press yesterday had a good roundup of the various efforts by anti-abortion activists to turn up the heat campaigning against ballot initiatives like the one in Arkansas:
The tactics include attempts to get signatures removed from initiative petitions, legislative pushes for competing ballot measures that could confuse voters and monthslong delays caused by lawsuits over ballot initiative language. Abortion rights advocates say many of the strategies build off ones tested last year in Ohio, where voters eventually passed a constitutional amendment affirming reproductive rights.
Among other maneuvers, the AP’s report highlighted the bizarre effort by the Arkansas Family Council and its leader, Jerry Cox, to dox canvassers collecting signatures for the Arkansas Abortion Amemndment. Canvassers such as Alison Guthrie say they’re staying the course.
If the measure does make the ballot, it will face an uphill climb in Arkansas. But the desperate lengths opponents are going to in order to try to keep it off the ballot altogether hints at the anxiety within the anti-abortion movement: Thus far, it turns out that when you put the issue directly to voters, they don’t see things quite the same way that Jerry Cox does. In Arkansas and elsewhere, anti-abortion activists have concluded that it’s best not to give the people a vote.