PHOENIX — For the anti-abortion movement, Arizona was supposed to be different.
After two years of losing abortion ballot measure fights 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 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 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 and leading GOP officials — including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and, at one time, 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 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 plan to support the proposition. A Fox News poll found even higher levels of approval, with 73 percent of Arizonans surveyed 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 that 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 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, 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) 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.
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