Anna Claire Vollers | (TNS) Stateline.org
For abortion rights supporters in Florida, it was a tumultuous day of highs and lows.
On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court paved the way for the state to ban nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. But it also OK’d a ballot measure that would allow Florida voters to overturn the ban this November.
“I was elated and devastated,” said Natasha Sutherland, the communications director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, a coalition of state and national organizations that gathered nearly 1 million signatures for a proposed constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion.
“Many women don’t even know they’re pregnant by the time they’re outside of the six-week window for abortion care,” said Sutherland, who lives in Tallahassee. “Considering the stakes are so high with the abortion ban we’re now under, it was really important for us to ensure we gave it all we’ve got.”
This November, voters in as many as nine states could sidestep their legislators and directly decide whether to expand access to abortion through citizen-led ballot initiatives. Constitutional amendments in Colorado, Florida and South Dakota already have qualified for the ballot, while coalitions in Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska and Nevada are still collecting signatures or awaiting state approval on their measures.
Two more states, Maryland and New York, have abortion rights ballot measures that were referred by their state legislatures, though New York’s is currently tied up in litigation.
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled the constitutional right to an abortion, kicking the issue back to the states. Fourteen states have outlawed abortion with almost no exceptions, while another seven states ban abortions at or before 18 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization.
Yet access to abortion remains popular, even in conservative states. Since the high court’s 2022 decision, voters in six states have approved abortion access via ballot measure, including in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.
“The whole idea of the initiative process is to put pressure on state lawmakers when there appears to be support for an issue that the median voter in the electorate might want but the median lawmaker doesn’t want,” said Daniel Smith, a professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Florida, who has authored books and papers on ballot initiatives.
In several states, Republican lawmakers opposed to abortion rights have tightened signature requirements or raised the percentage of the vote required for ballot initiatives to pass. Proponents of stricter rules say they want to prevent out-of-state interests from manipulating the process by funneling money to initiative campaigns. They say they also want to ensure that populous urban centers don’t have too much power. But in several cases, GOP backers have acknowledged that their goal is to thwart abortion rights measures that are broadly popular.
Mat Staver, an attorney based in Orlando, Florida, said it should be harder to get constitutional amendments passed because organizations from outside the state are funneling money into ballot initiatives such as the ones expanding reproductive rights. Staver is the co-founder …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
