The undoing of Roe v Wade has created a mighty political movement
Hikers climbing out of their cars early in the morning at North Mountain Park in Phoenix, Arizona, are welcomed by songbirds and two women behind a fold-up table. “Would you like to protect a woman’s right to choose?” asks Beth Ballmann, from beneath a bright pink sun hat. A barely awake young man mumbles something about not being registered. Linda Chiles’s eyes light up. “I can help you with that too. We can do it today!”
Along with many others, the two women are trying to collect enough signatures to add a referendum to Arizona ballots in November, which would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. The volunteers wear “We Can Do It” Rosie the Riveter T-shirts bought on Amazon. They have carried their clipboards to car parks, yoga classes, the state fair and many doorsteps. “They can’t escape us this time,” Ms Chiles whispers, as a couple returns from a hike. Indeed they don’t.
In its ruling on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation in June 2022, America’s Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, which had established a federal right to abortion for the previous half century. “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority. Two things have happened—one more expected than the other.
Republican-controlled state legislatures moved quickly to restrict abortion by passing laws of greater or lesser extremity (Texas bans even women who have been raped from obtaining them). These bans have not led to a reduction in the number of abortions nationally. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research group, estimates that the number rose by over a tenth between 2020 and 2023, to above 1m, partly because it has become easier to obtain abortion pills by post. The bans have forced more women to travel long distances, however. They have also led to appalling scenes in hospitals, as doctors fearful of breaking the new laws refuse to treat women who miscarry.
The second effect of the Dobbs judgment was that people infuriated by the decision have channelled their anger into political action. The decision and its consequences have released a vast amount of energy, which is most evident in the ballot campaigns in Arizona and other states. This friendliest and fiercest of citizen rebellions is the most important bottom-up force in American politics since the Tea Party movement that emerged in 2009. It could not only expand abortion access for tens of millions of women, but sway local and national elections. It could even determine whether Americans elect Donald Trump or Joe Biden as their next president.
Since the Dobbs decision, six states have held referendums on abortion—some seeking greater protections for women, others greater restrictions. Some were initiated by citizens, others by legislatures. In all six, the abortion-rights side prevailed. In November, referendums could be held in as many as 16 more states (see map). Campaigners already have enough signatures in some, including Florida. That state is crucial because it was the abortion destination for many women in the South until May 1st, when it outlawed most abortions after six weeks. If the initiative passes, abortion will be legalised up to the point of viability, roughly 24 weeks. Democrats hope the issue has put Florida in play in the presidential election.
On Lake Eola in downtown Orlando, tourists in pedalos look perplexed as protesters wave giant models of the female reproductive system, made of pool noodles. Signs declare that “not supporting women’s rights is small-dick energy”; T-shirts label supporters “abortion-rights barbies”. Deanna Fellows travelled 140 miles (225km) to the event by bus. She was one of 10,000 volunteers who helped gather over 1m signatures to ensure that Floridians will vote on abortion in November. She is 77, and it is her first protest.
The clipboard-wielding army
Women, many of them old enough to remember the days before 1973, when Roe was decided, are the motors of the new abortion-rights ballot movement. Ms Ballmann retired a few weeks before the Dobbs decision. She had never been politically active, but found a new calling after feeling “pure outrage”. An organiser in Florida, Anna Hochkammer, says that “annoyed housewives” printed petitions and took them to their local farmers’ markets. Experienced campaigners tend to turn up once local groups are up and running.
Campaign tactics vary from state to state. “What freedom means to an Ohioan versus a Floridian may be subtly different,” says Ms Hochkammer. In 2022 campaigners in firmly conservative Kansas alluded to pandemic-era mask and vaccine rules and encouraged voters to “say no to more government control”. The 2023 Ohio campaign was gentler and less individualistic. Adverts fronted by a reverend said that “abortion is a private, family decision.” Gabriel Mann from Pro-Choice Ohio, which led the campaign, said it did not focus on removing the stigma from abortion, but rather not letting “the government take this decision away”.
Grisly props like coat hangers, once ubiquitous at pro-choice rallies, are out of favour. Volunteers bring dry humour instead. A baseball cap states: “I chose this hat.” A T-shirt reads: “Mind your own uterus”. Also in are “women”. In Michigan, studiously non-gendered language (such as protecting “an individual’s ability to have an abortion”) fell flat in focus groups, says Bonsitu Kitaba of the American Civil Liberties Union, an advocacy group. “Freedom” is the uniting theme, appealing to libertarians, lefty feminists and others.
America’s anti-abortion movement began as a series of local grassroots movements. From the late 1960s, small groups came together to oppose the liberalisation of abortion in states like California, Colorado and New York. A fierce state-by-state conflict went national after Roe v Wade, says Mary Ziegler, a legal historian. She sees a parallel with the abortion-ballot movement. Like the anti-abortion movement, it is building a ground-level infrastructure that could enable it to become a powerful force nationally.
These days the pro-abortion-rights side has the momentum and the money. In 2022 and 2023 it outspent its opponents by almost two-to-one in Michigan and Ohio combined. It spent almost $50m in Michigan, making it the most expensive ballot measure in state history. Florida, with three of the country’s largest media markets and 13m registered voters to reach, is likely to be more expensive. Abortion-rights organisers expect to spend $68m in addition to the $19m already spent.
Various arms and political affiliates of Planned Parenthood, which provides health-care services including abortion, have given $17m in money and in kind, including $5m to the Florida initiative. Anti-abortion campaigns have been backed by Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a national organisation, and Catholic groups, including dioceses. The opposition campaigns admit they are on the back foot. “We are definitely going to be under financially resourced,” says Aaron DiPietro, of the Florida Family Policy Council. Their campaign labels the proposed amendment as extreme and overly broad.
The Florida initiative needs 60% of the vote to pass, a higher bar than any post-Dobbs abortion referendum has had to clear. In only two of the six states that have held referendums, California and Vermont, did the abortion-rights side get such a large share. When Michigan held its referendum in 2022, 57% voted in favour of protecting abortion even though 63% broadly supported the procedure, a rate similar to Floridians.
Lawsuits have been filed to try to block referendums on abortion, citing things such as confusing language and insufficient space between letters in the petitions. Another tactic is to use direct democracy to buttress abortion restrictions. In Nebraska, two abortion-related ballot initiatives are vying for signatures. One would enshrine the right to abortion up to the point of viability; the other would reinforce current state law by prohibiting abortion after 12 weeks. If both reach the ballot and get over 50% of votes, the one with the most votes will prevail. In a few states, including Iowa and Pennsylvania, legislators are trying to add anti-abortion amendments to the ballot.
A still greater obstacle to the efforts to liberalise abortion laws through citizen-led ballot initiatives is that not all states allow them. Only 24 out of 50 give citizens the power to try to change state laws or constitutions through ballot initiatives. Those states are concentrated in the west. They enshrined the right in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, under the influence of the Progressive movement. Few of the southern states with strict abortion bans allow citizens to change the law in the same fashion.
Protecting abortion in America as a whole can be achieved only through conventional politics. More politicians with liberal views on abortion would have to be elected to state legislatures, the House of Representatives, the Senate and the presidency—who could in turn change laws and appoint more liberal justices. Democrats heartily agree. They hope to harness the furious energy of the movement, and exploit the fact that more Americans trust Mr Biden than Mr Trump on abortion, making it a rare area of strength for him.
So far, ballot initiatives seem to have boosted turnout among people who are more likely to vote for the Democrats. In Michigan, the abortion referendum in 2022 may help explain why 37% of young people came out to vote in that year’s midterm elections, according to analysis from Tufts University. The national youth turnout was just 23%. In Kansas, which held a referendum in August 2022, women accounted for 62% of new voter registrations in the previous month, according to l2, a data firm.
A still more enticing prospect is that voters could be pulled away from the Republican camp. The midterm elections in 2022 hinted at that, too. Although only 14% of registered Republican voters were upset about the Dobbs ruling, a quarter of that group voted for a Democrat in their House district, according to analysis by Gary Jacobson at the University of California, San Diego. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology find a similar correlation: Republicans and independents who saw abortion as an important issue were more likely to vote for Democrats in 2022 than two years earlier. It is probably one reason a predicted “red wave” lifting Republican candidates failed to appear.
Ruben Gallego, a Democrat who is running for an open Senate seat in Arizona, hopes to hitch his fortunes to the abortion-rights locomotive. He praises the ballot-initiative campaign often, and petitions circulate at his campaign events. In a tv advert, he tells viewers that “We are at a crossroads” on abortion. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is trying to ensure that voters in battleground districts know about Republicans’ efforts to ban abortion nationwide.
In May a pro-Democratic group launched a $25m volley of ads in swing states, in which women accused Mr Trump of making their lives hell. Much more of that is to come. Between January and March 2022, less than 1% of Democratic adverts mentioned abortion, according to AdImpact, a research firm. By October of that year almost 40% did, and the proportion has barely dropped. Since the midterms, the Democrats and their backers have spent $123m on such adverts—over five times as much as Republicans.
Mr Biden’s campaign has paid for television advertisements in Arizona and Florida. One featured a Marine veteran labelling Mr Trump “not tough” for taking away women’s freedom. Others feature women’s stories of being deprived of medically needed abortions, with the label “Donald Trump did this.” The campaign is now trying to persuade Americans that Mr Trump would sign a national abortion ban if he were re-elected. He has avoided being drawn on the issue, but a recent poll by Navigator Research, a progressive pollster, suggests that a majority of Americans believe he would sign.
George Bush’s narrow victory in the presidential election in 2004 was initially ascribed to the anti-gay-marriage referendums that were on the ballot in around a dozen states. Academics are still arguing about that (some say that the threat of terrorism was more important). But the ballot initiatives appear to have mobilised white evangelical Protestants, including in Ohio, the crucial swing state that year.
“We’re not talking about a massive tide of people turning out,” says David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame. If the abortion referendums mobilise voters, the effect will be felt at the margins. But turnout has been an important factor in recent presidential elections, and small advantages in swing states can be decisive. Mr Campbell points out that taking away a right can electrify voters, and Dobbs was unprecedented in withdrawing a constitutional right that Americans had relied on for so long.
Campaigners for the ballot initiatives mostly welcome the attention. But they are keen to separate the abortion-rights issue from partisan politics. “Our job is to make sure that we are getting our message out to as broad a coalition as we possibly can,” says Chris Love from the Arizona campaign. “I think that Democrats really need to make sure that they’re doing their job and speaking to their base of voters, because our base of voters is different.”
Over one in three signatures in Florida comes from a Republican or an independent. In the referendums held so far, the vote to protect abortion has been larger than the vote for the top Democratic candidate. The biggest gap was in Kentucky, where in the 2022 midterms 52.3% voted against restricting abortion whereas only 38.2% voted for the Democratic candidate for the Senate, Charles Booker. In Michigan the abortion proposal received 56.7% of the vote compared with 54.5% for Gretchen Whitmer, the governor.
The movement’s impact on the 2024 election might not be as big as Democrats hope. But in the long run, it could change America’s abortion politics profoundly. Abortion access has long been backed by a strong majority, but until recently the support was largely passive. Dobbs changed that. It also threw the issue back to 50 individual states rather than to the nation as a whole, all but ensuring, for the foreseeable future, a patchwork system riddled with inequality and fraught legal and moral questions. The ballot movement is the majority’s first effort to take back control.
Eventually, unless public opinion changes or American democracy falters, the movement is likely to succeed. It is hard for courts or legislatures to resist indefinitely the adoption of any policy favoured by 60% or more of the public. This is particularly true about questions of personal choice and liberty. From alcohol prohibition to same-sex marriage to marijuana decriminalisation, liberalising majorities have eventually overcome restrictions imposed by conservative lawmakers. The ballot movement has provided America’s silent abortion-rights coalition with a voice and with momentum, although it may take years or decades to fully nationalise a legal right to choose.
Back at the Arizona trailhead, the signature collectors are busy. “I’ve thought about it some more and I’d like to sign,” says a father as he returns from the mountain with his teenage daughter. “I signed because I’m a woman and I’ve been dealing with this shit all my life,” says a fit-looking 82-year-old, who starts recruiting others in the car park. Myaa, a bespectacled 18-year-old in a Minnie Mouse T-shirt, needs no convincing (“Oooh, yes please”). She needed an abortion last year and it was a lot of hassle, involving parental sign-off, a notary, “lies” by authorities and a humiliating $1,000 loan. She hasn’t decided whether she will vote yet. If she does, she says she would go for Mr Trump.■