Florida Abortion Measure Win Motivates 2024 Petition Circulators

The Florida Supreme Court’s ruling that officially put an abortion rights measure on the November ballot is being celebrated by advocates of the national effort to put the issue before voters in nearly a dozen other states.

Florida’s high court on Monday rejected the state attorney general’s challenge to Amendment 4, which would prohibit state restrictions on abortion before fetal viability—roughly 24 weeks of gestation—or when an abortion is “necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

The measure would go further at protecting abortion access than the state’s existing law prohibiting the procedure beyond 15 weeks. The Florida Supreme Court upheld this ban Monday, allowing for a six-week ban that had been on hold to go into effect after 30 days.

Florida joins Maryland and New York with proposed abortion rights constitutional amendments certified for the 2024 general election ballot. The issue could come before voters in as many as 11 additional states, eight of which have ballot committees actively collecting signatures on amendments to protect abortion access.

Petition circulators in those states, including Arizona and Arkansas, see the court ruling and signatures of support from more than 996,000 voters in Republican-led Florida as signs of Democrats’ success in putting the issue of abortion access before voters in statewide referendums.

Amid a patchwork of state laws restricting abortion access after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, advocacy groups across the political spectrum view the 2024 election as important for shaping the future of US abortion access.

“Seeing a ballot fight moving forward” in Florida is “an energizing moment for anyone doing similar work across the country,” said Dani Negrete, national political director for the Indivisible Project. The advocacy group has supported abortion rights campaigns in states, including last year’s decisive vote in favor of abortion rights in Republican-led Ohio.

In several states with proposed abortion rights measures, anti-abortion groups have started campaigns to discourage voters from signing petitions. These campaigns argue the proposals would give widely unfettered access to abortion and conflict with state restrictions on the procedure.

In five states—Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania—citizen-led initiatives or legislative proposals are seeking to place measures on the ballot to maintain existing abortion limits or specify their state constitutions don’t protect a right to abortion.

‘Protecting Abortion Access’

In a presidential election year, national political advocacy groups are mobilizing on the abortion issue in potential battleground states like Arizona and Nevada, as well as traditionally red states like Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, looking for success similar to that in Ohio last year.

“The fact that there are initiatives moving on to the ballot and succeeding in red states like Ohio” really “helps people to envision the long term strategy of protecting abortion access nationwide,” said Olivia Cappello, state communications campaigns manager for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund is advising abortion ballot campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, and six other states.

Planned Parenthood has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg Law’s parent company.

The Indivisible Project is focused especially on the ballot initiative in Arizona, which as of January had gathered more than 250,000 of the 384,000 signatures needed by July 3 to get a spot on the ballot. The reproductive rights coalition Arizona for Abortion Access hopes to gather at least double the number of signatures required for the group’s measure, which would establish a “fundamental right” to abortion before viability.

Chris Love, senior adviser to Arizona for Abortion Access, said in an interview the progress so far by the campaign in Florida and elsewhere “make it even more clear that abortion is an important issue that we need to keep at the forefront of voters’ minds in 2024.”

Besides Ohio, voters have supported enshrining a constitutional right to abortion in California, Michigan, and Vermont. In 2022, voters rejected anti-abortion referendums in Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana. Americans have widely opposed complete bans on abortion, with 69% of voters included in a February KFF poll saying they believed abortion should be legal in “all” or “most cases.”

SBA Pro-Life America is supporting campaigns opposing abortion rights initiatives in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota.

Kelsey Pritchard, the anti-abortion group’s director of state public affairs, said the Florida attorney general’s “willingness to challenge the language of Florida’s proposed abortion amendment has emboldened state leaders to stand up against deceptive abortion measures that violate state laws.”

Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, for example, in January blocked a ballot proposal seeking to create a constitutional right to abortion. The Montana Supreme Court in March overruled this decision and directed Knudsen to develop a ballot statement for the measure.

Opposition Campaigns

As abortion rights groups gather signatures, anti-abortion groups in various states are also ramping up “decline to sign” campaigns or petitions for their own constitutional amendments.

In Arizona, the It Goes Too Far campaign supported by conservative advocacy groups in the state is seeking to encourage voters not to sign onto the abortion rights measure.

Cindy Dahlgren, a spokesperson for It Goes Too Far, argued the proposed abortion measure would dismantle “common sense safety precautions that keep girls and women safe.” Abortion is currently banned in Arizona after 15 weeks of pregnancy, patients are not allowed to get the abortion pill by mail, and parental consent is required to perform an abortion on a minor.

“We have hundreds of volunteers throughout the state that are laser focused on informing voters” of “exactly what is at stake in this abortion amendment and what they stand to lose if this abortion amendment passes,” Dahlgren said in an interview.

SBA is supporting a Nebraska ballot measure filed March 1 to prohibit abortions in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy except in medical emergencies or when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.

In Arkansas, a group chaired by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ 2022 gubernatorial campaign manager is opposing various ballot initiatives in the state, including one from Arkansans for Limited Government that would amend the state constitution to protect access to abortion within 18 weeks of gestation. The ballot question committee, called Stronger Arkansas, filed a statement of organization with the Arkansas Ethics Commission March 15.

Chris Caldwell, the chair of the group and Sanders’ former campaign manager, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Gennie Diaz, Arkansans for Limited Government’s communications director, said in an interview she was surprised to see the opposition group led by advisers to Sanders, noting the governor and many state legislators have so far “stayed out of weighing in on taking a stance on this abortion amendment.”

A South Dakota abortion rights measure has also garnered opposition in the heavily Republican state. Adam Weiland, a co-founder of Dakotans for Health, said a “decline to sign” petition supported by South Dakota Right to Life has been “doing anything and everything that they can to stop us.”

A bill signed into law in March by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) allows people to remove their signatures from ballot initiative petitions. The sponsor of the bill, Republican Rep. Jon Hansen, serves on the board of directors for South Dakota Right to Life.

Even if abortion rights measures get on the ballot and are approved by voters in 2024, organizers predict a swarm of legal challenges or legislation seeking to reverse voter outcomes.

Michigan officials are currently asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit led by Right to Life of Michigan that seeks to undo abortion protections approved by a majority of the state’s voters in November 2022.

But Love said she is confident the language they developed in Arizona “will hold up in our court system.”

We’re “ensuring that we have the legal support that we need for challenges after we’re successful at the ballot,” Love said