Photograph by Jose Luis Magana / AP
Donald Trump’s views on abortion are famously mutable, but he has two positions that are more or less consistent. One is that his Democratic opponents support the right to “execute” infants. (They do not.) The other is that abortion is a states’-rights issue, as established by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. “For fifty-two years they’ve been trying to get Roe v. Wade into the states,” Trump alleged in his debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris. “And through the genius and heart and strength of six Supreme Court justices, we were able to do that.” He went on to clarify whom he meant by “they”: “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative—they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote and that’s what happened.”
Since Dobbs was handed down, seven states have voted on ballot initiatives related to abortion, and the pro-choice side has won every time. “Now, Ohio? The vote was somewhat liberal,” Trump said in the debate. “Kansas? The vote was somewhat liberal. Much more liberal than people would have thought.” Yet Trump has at least ostensibly kept his faith in the democratic process to decide abortion law. In August, when asked whether he would direct the F.D.A. to “revoke access to mifepristone”—one of the two drugs used in medication abortion—the former President seemed to stumble over the terminology, but quickly steadied himself on the will of the people: “You could do things that will be, would, would supplement, absolutely, and those things are pretty open and humane. But you have to be able to have a vote, and all I want to do is give everybody a vote, and the votes are taking place right now as we speak.”
Trump has a clear political incentive for recasting the end of a constitutional right as the mere prologue to a triumph of direct democracy. The fall of Roe and its catastrophic aftermath was a major driving force behind Democratic turnout in the 2022 midterms. In 2024, reproductive freedom is Harris’s strongest issue, and has allowed her to slash at Trump’s numbers among white women especially.
Today, voters in ten more states are deciding on constitutional amendments that codify abortion rights. These include three states—Florida, Missouri, and South Dakota—with total or near-total bans on abortion; a fourth, Nebraska, that prohibits most abortions after the first trimester; and a fifth, Arizona, that has a fifteen-week ban. Most of the pro-choice ballot measures are polling with majority support. (The referendums require a simple majority to pass, with the exception of Colorado, where the threshold is fifty-five per cent, and Florida, where it is sixty per cent.)
In some states where citizens have initiated ballot measures on abortion rights, elected representatives have gone to extraordinary lengths to thwart their efforts. In Arkansas, which has the nation’s highest maternal-mortality rate and one of its most draconian abortion bans, volunteers gathered more than a hundred thousand signatures in support of an amendment, but the Republican secretary of state blocked it from the final ballot, citing a paperwork error. In Florida, people who provided signatures in support of the state’s ballot measure received visits from state police investigating spurious allegations of fraud, and local television stations were threatened with criminal prosecution for airing an ad in support of the amendment. And in Missouri the Republican secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, attempted first to plant inflammatory language in the proposed Amendment 3—alleging that it would permit “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth”—and then to unilaterally decertify it. (The state Supreme Court overruled Ashcroft on both counts.)
Missouri has also been the site of an aggressive disinformation campaign that has used billboards and local radio to link the proposed amendment to ninth-month abortions and “child gender surgery.” The political-action committee behind at least some of the billboards, Vote No on 3, recently received a last-minute, million-dollar donation from an advocacy group linked to Leonard Leo, the co-chairman of the Federalist Society. The fervor and deep pockets of the opposition indicate that, even if reproductive rights prevail on the ballot in Missouri and elsewhere, the abortion wars will be far from over.
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