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VOTERS APPEAR READY TO REJECT ARIZONA’S ABORTION ‘COMPROMISE’
 
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Alice Miranda Ollstein
October 26, 2024
Politico
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_ Arizonans are poised to handily reject the 15-week ban and add
abortion protections to their state constitution, just as voters did
in Michigan, Ohio and other red and purple states while facing
six-week and near-total bans. _

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PHOENIX — For the anti-abortion movement, Arizona was supposed to be
different.

After two years of losing abortion ballot measure fights
[[link removed]] around
the country, conservatives held up the state’s 15-week ban as a
winning post-_Roe _strategy — a middle ground they argued most
Americans embrace.

Instead, with just days left until Election Day, Arizonans are poised
to handily reject
[[link removed]] the
15-week ban and add abortion protections to their state constitution,
just as voters did in Michigan, Ohio and other red and purple states
while facing six-week and near-total bans. It’s the latest evidence
that even voters who tell pollsters they oppose second- and
third-trimester abortions
[[link removed]] will,
when given a chance, vote against government-imposed restrictions on
the procedure — regardless of the number of weeks.

Passage of Arizona’s measure would undermine the argument from the
country’s biggest anti-abortion groups
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leading GOP officials — including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin
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one time
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former President Donald Trump — that rallying around a 15-week
cutoff would help neutralize an issue that has dogged conservatives
throughout the 2024 campaign. Even as they succeed in banning the
procedure in roughly one-third of the country, a loss in Arizona would
show how far the anti-abortion movement has to go to win a majority of
voters.

“If it passes, then we’re in a worse position than we were
with _Roe v. Wade_,” said Kelly Copeland, an anti-abortion activist
based in Tucson. “It’s a new paradigm we’d have to overcome.”

In the final weeks of the election, despite polls showing
[[link removed]] the
initiative is far more popular than either presidential candidate,
Arizona conservatives insist the state’s current law is their secret
sauce for ending progressives’ ballot measure winning streak.

“For most Arizonans, I think a 15-week limit sounds reasonable, and
a 15-week limit still allows 95 percent of abortions,” said Cathi
Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, an influential
conservative advocacy group. “I think that a strong majority still
do not support later-term abortions.”

That was the argument a handful of Arizona Republicans made in May
when they joined with Democrats to repeal the state’s 1864
near-total abortion ban before it could take effect. State Sen.
Shawnna Bolick, one of a few Republicans to cross the aisle, told her
colleagues in a floor speech that it would be far easier to defend a
15-week ban than a near-total ban and that embracing the Civil War-era
law would compel voters to overturn it by ballot measure.

“I want to protect our state constitution from unlimited
abortions,” she said. “I am here to protect more babies.”

But with early voting underway and the ballot measure still showing
overwhelming support, popular even among Republicans and independents,
some conservatives feel that calculation was a mistake.

Rep. Alex Kolodin, a Republican and member of the state’s Freedom
Caucus, told POLITICO he feels “rolled” by his colleagues.

“They were essentially buying the premise that it’s desirable to
have some amount of abortion on demand,” he said. “I get it. They
feel like they got to do it, because that’s where the society and
the culture and popular opinion are at. But I don’t think you change
that popular opinion by buying the premise.”

Some anti-abortion activists working to defeat the ballot measure
oppose the state’s 15-week ban given that more than 90 percent of
all abortions in the U.S. occur before that point in pregnancy, but
they believe defeating the initiative will bring them closer to their
long-term goal of making abortion not just illegal but
“unthinkable.”

“We do believe in heartbeat bills and life-at-conception laws, but
right now, we do have to look to what’s going to make us the most
pro-life as possible,” said Jordan Brittain, the Western Regional
Manager for Students for Life of America, as she led a team of recent
college graduates knocking on doors in the Tucson suburbs in October.

Conservatives are correct that even as public support for abortion
access hits a record high post-_Roe_, it’s significantly lower for
abortions later in pregnancy. Still, the battleground state is
expected to vote to restore abortion access through fetal viability
— about 22 to 24 weeks — and allow termination in the final months
of pregnancy if there’s a threat to the health or life of the
mother. A New York Times poll found nearly two-thirds of Arizona
voters
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to support the proposition. A Fox News poll found even higher levels
of approval, with 73 percent of Arizonans
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saying they would vote for the measure.

 

Some attribute Arizonans’ support for the ballot measure to the
state’s libertarian, get-the-government-out-of-my-business ethos.
Others credit the 1864 near-total abortion ban
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almost took effect earlier this year for convincing voters that GOP
officials would go beyond 15 weeks if given the chance. And still,
others said stories of women around the country denied care during
obstetric emergencies that have emerged since the fall of _Roe v.
Wade_ convinced them that the issue should be taken out of the
legislature’s hands.

“Arizona voters understand that this is an overreach of
government,” said Chris Love, a Planned Parenthood senior adviser
and spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access. “Regardless of
what the ban is or how many weeks there are, people should be able to
decide about abortion and their reproductive health care with the
people that they actually care about — their families, their medical
providers, not politicians or courts.”

Rebecca Gau, a lifelong Republican voter in Phoenix, served as
president of her College Republicans chapter in the 1990s and worked
for former GOP Gov. Jan Brewer in the mid-aughts. But she changed her
registration to independent earlier this year, and a major motivator
was the Republican Party’s state- and national-level push to
restrict abortion.

“The government shouldn’t have anything to do with it,” she told
POLITICO. “I personally am very fortunate that if I had ever been in
a situation with an unwanted pregnancy, I would have been able to
handle it no matter what, but I know there are people who aren’t in
that position, and it’s not my place to judge.”

Like their counterparts in other states that have tried and failed to
defeat abortion-rights ballot measures, Arizona conservatives are
getting massively outraised and outspent by their opponents. The
amendment’s sponsor, Arizona for Abortion Access, brought in $32.7
million through the end of September, according to campaign finance
reports. The main organization opposing the proposition, called It
Goes Too Far, raised just under $1.3 million. The disparity means that
while the amendment backers are airing pricey statewide TV ads, the
opposition campaign is largely relying on volunteer outreach and
appearing at state-sponsored town halls and televised debates to get
their message out. Some conservatives, including Herrod, fault the
state’s campaign finance disclosure rules for deterring
conservatives from supporting the effort.

“Most people don’t like the harassment that comes with the donor
disclosure laws, and it’s a violation of their constitutional
rights,” she said. “That makes it much harder to raise money.”

Outside her office, a van’s back window bore a handwritten message
in large white letters, one repeated on billboards, lawn signs and
pamphlets across the state: “Abortion is already legal in
Arizona.”

The groups working to defeat the ballot measure are pushing that
framing as they argue the 15-week ban is “reasonable” compared to
the “extreme” expanded abortion access that would be allowed under
the initiative.

“Right now we have something in the state that is a compromise,”
said Copeland, who has been organizing prayer vigils and car parades
in opposition to the initiative. “Fifteen weeks gives most women the
opportunity to know whether they’re pregnant and make a good
choice.”

It’s an argument that infuriates many voters, particularly people
who experienced complications later in pregnancy and were denied care
under the state’s ban.

Mesa resident and physician associate Ashley Ortiz hadn’t suspected
anything was wrong when she went to her OB-GYN last December. It was
her first pregnancy, and her previous ultrasounds found no problems.
But the 20-week anatomy scan revealed her cervix had dilated too early
and the baby’s foot was sticking out, rendering the pregnancy
nonviable.

Typically, a woman in her situation would be given abortion medication
to spur contractions and end the pregnancy. Instead, because of the
state’s ban, she was instructed to wait until either she developed a
life-threatening infection resulting from her cervix being open or
until the baby’s heart stopped.

After two days in the hospital, her baby’s heart stopped, and
doctors gave Ortiz misoprostol to induce delivery. By that point,
however, her membranes and placenta had clotted to her uterine lining,
and she needed emergency surgery on Christmas morning.

“I felt very traumatized by the experiences and the understanding
that my human rights were not considered as valuable as the rights of
the fetus that was not even viable,” said Ortiz, who told her
story in an ad [[link removed]] for the
Arizona ballot measure. As she and her husband try to get pregnant,
she added, “I’m hoping that we pass Prop. 139 so that if this
happens again, I don’t fear for my own life.”

Anti-abortion activists, well aware they could lose in Arizona, are
already debating where their movement goes from here.

Some, including Copeland, want to challenge the initiative in court
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and if judges decline to strike it down, pursue another ballot measure
next cycle to override it. Others, including Brittain, want to see the
abortion opponents focus more on changing hearts and minds than
changing laws, including through supporting crisis pregnancy centers
and demonstrating outside abortion clinics.

“It’s a battle, and it can be really disheartening to feel like we
did all this work just to see it reversed,” she said. “But none of
the work, if it’s being done for the right reason, with the right
motivation, is ever wasted — God uses it all.”

And still others, including Kolodin, hope the GOP learns that policies
like the 15-week ban, which attempt to please everyone, end up
pleasing no one.

One call from a constituent that he received in the lead-up to the
vote on the 1864 ban sticks in his mind as evidence that the
anti-abortion movement has lost credibility among Arizonans.

“She goes, ‘Alex, I’m a pro-choice person. I think abortion
should be unrestricted. But I don’t get, from the other side’s
perspective, what 15 weeks is about. If it’s a life, it should be
zero weeks. And if it’s not, then 15 weeks, all you’re doing is
trying to control women’s bodies.’”

_Alice Ollstein (Twitter/X
[[link removed]])
is a health care reporter for POLITICO Pro, covering the Capitol Hill
beat. Prior to joining POLITICO, she covered federal policy and
politics for Talking Points Memo._

_Alice graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been reporting
in D.C. ever since, covering the Supreme Court, Congress and national
elections for TV, radio, print, and online outlets. Her work has aired
on Free Speech Radio News, All Things Considered, Channel News Asia,
and Telesur, and her writing has been published by The Atlantic, La
Opinión, and The Hill Rag. She was elected in 2016 as an at-large
board member of the DC Chapter of the Society of Professional
Journalists. In 2017, she was named one of the New Media Alliance's
"Rising Stars" under 30._

_POLITICO [[link removed]] is the global authority
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* abortion
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* Reproductive rights
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* Arizona
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* anti-abortion
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