Even as Republicans swept into power in Washington in last year’s elections, abortion rights supporters found success at the ballot box across the country. But that hasn’t deterred abortion opponents.
Republican lawmakers have moved forward this year with bills to restrict abortion in more than half of the states where voters passed constitutional amendments in November to protect or expand reproductive rights.
They’ve also advanced bills in a bevy of states that would make if more difficult for groups to place similar measures on the ballot in the future. Those efforts extend to three states where amendments to enshrine a constitutional right to an abortion fell short last November.
“The abortion industry’s attempts to completely deregulate their industry via ballot measures is putting women and girls in danger,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in an email. “Republican leaders in states with pro-abortion ballot measures should be doing all that they can to protect health and safety protections for women and girls.”
Reproductive rights groups say the actions — even if ultimately unsuccessful — amount to an overt rejection of the desires of voters on the issue of abortion.
“Even when their voters made their support of abortion access extremely clear with these ballot amendments, Republicans are still willing to trample them,” said Yari Aquino, who helps advise candidates for EMILY’s List, a national group that backs Democratic women who support abortion rights.
Aquino suggested that if conservatives’ efforts continue, Democrats would be wise to keep abortion rights at the center of their platform heading into next year’s midterms.
“This is why abortion rights and reproductive rights continue to be such a salient issue,” she said.
In Arizona, where voters overwhelmingly chose to enshrine abortion rights in their state constitution five months ago, Republicans in the state Legislature have advanced bills that would create new restrictions on the use of abortion-inducing drugs. Those include the requirement that a doctor must examine a patient before the patient can obtain the drugs. Another bill would ban doctors in the state from introducing abortion care to their patients as a prospective treatment option.
The bill proposes punishing doctors and practices who “promote” abortion care as a potential treatment option by stripping them of any contracts or funding from any state agencies.
Critics argue the bills are a “backdoor” way to eliminate Medicaid funding for any practice that even mentions abortion to a pregnant patient.
“Arizonans spoke their voice. They used their voice to say what they wanted,” said Arizona state Rep. Stephanie Simacek, a Democrat who has co-sponsored multiple bills that seek to protect or expand abortion rights. “This is just another way for [Republicans] to push exactly what they did not get.”
“It’s a backdoor way for them to try to come in and overrule the voice of the people here in Arizona,” she added.
Republicans in Missouri are teeing up a ballot measure that would reverse the one voters approved in November that effectively protected abortion rights until fetal viability and undid a near-total abortion ban on the books.
Conservative lawmakers in the state have also introduced legislation that would allow Missourians to wipe out most all of their tax bill if they donate what they owed in state income taxes to pregnancy resource centers, which reproductive rights advocates say are designed to steer pregnant women away from abortions.
In Montana, where voters enshrined abortion access into the state constitution, GOP lawmakers responded by introducing a bill that seeks to make traveling to or from the state for an abortion later in pregnancy a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. The bill, which compared that action to human “trafficking,” was eventually tabled.
In Colorado, where abortion had already been legal through fetal viability, voters passed a measure to formally enshrine those rights. Republican legislators there introduced a bill that would make bringing a minor to the state for an abortion a felony crime.
Voters in Kentucky, a Republican stronghold that has a near-total ban on abortion, rejected an initiative in 2023 to amend the state constitution to explicitly state that there isn’t a right to abortion.
Republican lawmakers still passed a bill that abortion advocates said further narrowed the medical exceptions that had been allowed under the existing abortion ban. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed the bill, but Republicans in the Legislature used their supermajority to override it.
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in at least 15 states have advanced bills in recent weeks that would make it more difficult for proposed constitutional amendments to qualify for the ballot.
In Arizona, Missouri and South Dakota, legislators are attempting to raise the threshold for passage for ballot measures to 60% from a simple majority.
In those states, as well as Montana, Nebraska, Florida and Arkansas, Republicans have also advanced bills that create more onerous signature requirements for proposed amendments to qualify for the ballot. (Voters rejected amendments to enshrine abortion rights in the constitution in 2024 in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota.)
Groups that advocate for reproductive rights and for ballot measures said these actions are an effort to roll back voters’ rights.
“Ballot measures have been a lifeline to working people in red and purple states, allowing them to make change even when politicians fail to represent their interests. Legislators are trying to systematically take that power away,” Kelly Hall, the executive director of the Fairness Project, a nonprofit organization that helps progressive groups advance citizen-led ballot initiatives, said in a statement.
“This is their playbook,” Hall said, adding that when “politicians know they can’t win with voters on the issues, they try to change the rules of the game.”
