Abortion on the ballot: Dems say Arizonans will punish the GOP in November

Athena Salman, executive director of Arizona Reproductive Freedom for All, speaks at a press conference on June 24, 2024, about the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court stripping Americans of the right to receive abortions. Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez | Arizona Mirror

On the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats in Arizona urged voters to reject former president Donald Trump in November, saying that the lives and safety of women are at stake. 

And a failure to do so will spell disaster for reproductive health care across the country. 

“Trump and his MAGA loyalists will not stop until every state in our union lives under a full-scale abortion ban, and the only that we can stop it is if we turn out at the polls and vote for Democrats,” Arizona Democratic Party Chairwoman Yolanda Bejarano said during a Monday morning news conference. 

With the November election on the horizon, Democrats have gone on the offensive, highlighting the GOP’s anti-abortion platform and, in particular, slamming the party’s likely presidential nominee for his role in overturning Roe v. Wade. Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices during his presidency, and has repeatedly bragged about being responsible for the fall of Roe. 

Democrats have also pointed to Trump’s continued support for restrictive abortion policies as a reason to reject him. In April, Trump stated that the regulation of abortion should be left up to individual states, but he previously signaled an interest in a national 15-week ban. Such a ban would nullify abortion rights movements, like the one in Arizona, that seek to enshrine the procedure in state constitutions. 

And Trump’s allies, including one of his top legal advisors, are preparing to use the Comstock Act, a federal law from the 1870s, to effectively ban abortion nationwide.

Bejarano said Arizonans face attacks on abortion access from Republicans at both the federal and state level. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the Arizona legislature and have spent the last several years passing increasingly restrictive abortion laws, including a 15-week gestational ban that is currently in effect. 

And earlier this year, after the Arizona Supreme Court revived a near-total ban from 1864 that threatened doctors with prison time, Republican lawmakers resisted repealing the law for a month and shot down several Democrat-led bids to strike it down. Arizona voters will keep that in mind at the ballot box, Bejarano warned.

“Arizonans deserve access to every form of reproductive health care, and the right to access that care solely belongs to us. MAGA Republicans are on the record wanting to ban abortion and Arizonans will remember that in November,” she said. 

Athena Salman, executive director of Arizona Reproductive Freedom for All, was near tears as she discussed the potential harm women in the Grand Canyon State and across the country could face if Trump regains the presidency. She shared a recent meeting she had with an Arizona woman who was prevented from obtaining an abortion shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court derailed access to the procedure in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and catapulted Arizona into uncertainty as state officials vied over the 1864 law and a 15-week gestational ban. 

Salman said the woman, who had an unviable pregnancy, nearly died before she was able to obtain an abortion. 

“As her 5-year-old daughter was talking to our intern and playing, she looked at her and she said, ‘My daughter almost grew up without a mother,’” Salman said, her voice shaking. 

Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, D-Tucson, called on voters to flip the legislature blue, saying that, if Democrats had held the legislative majority, access to abortion would never have seen the disruptions it did under Republican rule in the past two years.  

“The truth is, if Democrats were in control of the legislature, the 1864 law could have been taken off of the books years ago,” she said. “And, certainly, the 1864 ruling would have been repealed in one day. That’s why we must elect a new legislative majority this November.” 

Attorney General Kris Mayes added that Arizona voters have the power to cement or doom reproductive rights in the state, and every vote counts. The Democrat, who made abortion a focal point of her 2022 campaign, said that her Republican opponent, who lost by just 280 votes, would have upheld the 1864 near-total ban. Instead, her office has supported legal challenges that preserved access to mifepristone, the most widely used abortion drug, amid a federal challenge from GOP-led states, and won a critical 90-delay in the case against the Civil War-era ban that helped ensure it will never be enforced. 

Showing up at the polls to support pro-choice candidates this year can mean the difference between life and death for many, Mayes said. 

“Vote as if your life, or your friend’s life or your daughter’s life, depends on it — because it very well might,” she said. 

Mayes added that, even with the threat of the 1864 near-total ban virtually neutralized, her office has been told by doctors and medical professionals that they’re still hesitant to provide potentially life-saving abortion care. That’s because the state is under a 15-week gestational ban that carries with it a class 6 felony. 

The law includes exceptions for women facing death or the “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.” But the latter exception is defined broadly and includes everything from cell growth to the normal functions of the reproductive, neurological, respiratory, circulatory, bowel, digestive, bladder or endocrine systems. 

Mayes has been asked by Democratic lawmakers to clarify the law’s exceptions, and she said she expects her office to issue a formal legal opinion on Thursday. Providing clarity, she said, is imperative when the health and lives of women are on the line because doctors are worried about being criminalized for providing critical care. 

“One emergency room doctor from Banner looked at me and said, ‘(Attorney) General Mayes, how close to death do I have to allow a woman to get before I know that I won’t be prosecuted under these abortion bans?’” Mayes said. 

While uncertainty about the 15-week law exists in the medical community, it’s unlikely that any doctor will be taken to court for violating the law’s mandates. An executive order issued by Gov. Katie Hobbs last year centralizes all prosecutorial authority for the law in the state attorney general’s office, and Mayes has vowed never to take any healthcare provider to court over it. 

On Monday, she reiterated that promise, and warned that any county attorneys seeking to go over her head to take up cases of their own would face lawsuits from her office. Soon after Hobbs issued her executive order, a group of county attorneys voiced their disapproval of it and warned that they would issue a legal challenge over it, but none has yet materialized. 

Reproductive rights advocates hope that Arizona voters will approve an abortion rights ballot measure in November that would effectively eliminate any confusion or hesitancy from doctors by striking down the 15-week ban and other hostile abortion laws. The Arizona Abortion Access Act seeks to add abortion as a right in the state constitution and guarantee access to it up to 24 weeks of gestation, with exceptions beyond that point if a health care provider deems an abortion necessary to safeguard a patient’s life, physical or mental health. 

Proponents are optimistic it will pass with broad support, as has happened when similar measures have been on the ballot in other states in recent years, including Republican strongholds like Kansas, where voters turned out in record numbers to preserve abortion access. Democrats and reproductive rights groups alike are counting on the same enthusiasm in Arizona to deliver wins not just for the abortion rights ballot measure, but also for pro-choice candidates. 

“Our fundamental rights are always at risk in the hands of extremist politicians,” Dawn Penich, spokeswoman for the Arizona for Abortion Access Campaign, said in an emailed statement. “The only way Arizona can reliably restore and protect access to abortion once and for all is to enshrine this right in our state’s constitution putting these decisions back in the hands of patients, our families and our trusted healthcare providers, out of reach from the whims of politicians.”

The campaign has far exceeded its signature requirement to qualify for the November ballot and will turn in its signature sheets for verification on July 3. 

While Democrats and abortion rights groups marked the overturning of Roe as a call to action for voters, some anti-abortion organizations celebrated the anniversary and advocated for increased restrictions. 

Alliance Defending Freedom, a Scottsdale-based legal firm that has been at the forefront of many high-profile anti-abortion cases, and pushed for the reinstatement of Arizona’s 1864 near-total abortion ban in court, said Dobbs “righted a 50-year-wrong.” 

“Dobbs was a monumental victory,” wrote ADF, in a post on social media site X, formerly Twitter. “It will always be worth celebrating. But it wasn’t the end. Now, a new chapter of the pro-life story has begun. Our movement must work to rebuild a culture of life not just in the courtroom, but in our local pregnancy centers, neighborhoods, schools—even our own homes.”

Cathi Herrod, president of the anti-abortion Center for Arizona Policy, which has been behind many of the state’s laws restricting abortion access, including the current 15-week gestational ban, criticized the move to add abortion rights to Arizona’s Constitution. She praised the Dobbs decision and the subsequent abortion restrictions passed across the country.

“The Dobbs ruling and the subsequent changes to abortion law reflect the American system of government at work; the judiciary interpreting law, and the legislative branch making policy reflective of the people represented,” Herrod said in an emailed statement. 

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