“I completely understand what it means to feel like you don’t have any rights when it comes to what you want to do with your body or the big choices that come with pregnancy,” said Jasmine Smith, a mother, full-spectrum doula and sworn campaign sponsor for Nebraska’s Protect Our Rights, which is trying to overturn a 12-week ban and enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. (Courtesy of Protect Our Rights)
Of the 10 states with citizen-initiated abortion-rights measures on their ballots, only Nebraska will have two competing proposed amendments. So far, every state that has voted on abortion changes since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022 has sided with abortion rights, but none yet had two amendments offering different options.
Initiative Measure 434, organized by Protect Women and Children, would ban abortion after the first trimester in the Nebraska constitution and allow lawmakers to pass even earlier limits. It reads: “Except when a woman seeks an abortion necessitated by a medical emergency or when the pregnancy results from sexual assault or incest, unborn children shall be protected from abortion in the second and third trimesters.”
Initiative Measure 439, organized by Protect Our Rights, would establish a “fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient, without interference from the state or its political subdivisions.” The coalition includes ACLU Nebraska, I Be Black Girl, and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Nebraska.
Approval requires a majority of ballots cast in favor, with a minimum of 35% of the vote. If both are approved, the amendment with the most votes becomes law, Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen has said. The respective campaigns for the two proposals have told voters to remember to vote on both amendments, approving one and rejecting the other.
Both campaigns submitted more than the 123,000 signatures required to qualify for the ballot: Protect Women and Children submitted more than 205,000, while Protect Our Rights submitted more than 207,000. There had been a third ballot measure that defined embryos as people that ultimately did not submit petitions. This summer, more than 300 people requested to have their signatures removed from the Protect Women and Children’s list of signatures, some saying they were misled into thinking they were signing an abortion-rights petition.
The Protect Women and Children campaign did not respond to multiple requests to participate in this Q&A series. Supporters for the initiative filed two lawsuits trying to get Protect Our Rights’ amendment off the ballot, arguing it violated the state’s single-subject rule. In response, doctors in support of the Protect Our Rights campaign sued to have the court validate either both or neither measure. Last month, the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled both amendments could be on the ballot.
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The Protect Women and Children campaign has said their initiative would preserve “commonsense abortion limits,” and that the competing abortion-rights initiative too broadly expands when a pregnancy is viable. Some of its main backers include longtime anti-abortion groups such as Nebraska Right to Life, Nebraska Family Alliance, and Nebraska Catholic Conference, along with U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Nebraska, who has sponsored anti-abortion bills in Congress. Nebraska Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has said his ultimate goal is to pass a total state ban on abortion starting at conception.
Doctors estimate that most fetuses can survive outside the uterus between 22-24 weeks’ gestation, though sometimes potentially fatal conditions develop in women and fetuses beyond this point. Despite laws attempting to standardize viability and gestational limits, viability varies for each pregnancy and gestational age is imprecisely measured. Nebraska law does not allow for abortions after 12 weeks for fatal fetal anomalies but includes exceptions for medical emergencies and rape and incest.
Someone who understands how varied and individualistic pregnancies are is Jasmine Smith, a mother, full-spectrum doula, and community health worker in Omaha. She told States Newsroom she was recruited as a volunteer sponsor for the Protect Our Rights campaign because she’s been an outspoken supporter of reproductive choice.
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
States Newsroom: Why did you decide to get involved in the Protect Our Rights campaign?
Jasmine Smith: I’m a mother. I’m also a full-spectrum doula and an abortion doula. So I get every side of it. I completely understand what it means to feel like you don’t have any rights when it comes to what you want to do with your body or the big choices that come with pregnancy. That’s definitely how I felt. I got pregnant when I was 20, and that’s a really, really big choice for somebody who’s just gonna figure it out. But it’s also just a big choice in general — bringing another life into this world is a big decision, and sometimes we have to make those decisions and no one likes the decision. And it’s hard to keep going when everyone’s against what you want to do.
SN: When you had your baby, did you feel supported and like you had the resources you needed?
JS: Oh no, absolutely not. And this is something I noticed, too. There’s so many strong opinions when people want to have an abortion, and then when the baby gets here through pregnancy, it’s just like everybody vanishes. It’s just that, “No, don’t do it, absolutely not.” And then it’s like, “OK, well, I need help.” “Well, you shouldn’t have got pregnant.” “Well, I am now, and I need community help. I need familial support, like, I need the support still — not just because I kept it, but because there’s someone coming into this world, and they need to feel supported, so that I can feel supported.”
It’s just an interesting dichotomy to say that abortion is completely wrong, it’s terrible, you shouldn’t do this thing — but this is what I need to do for myself. So, how am I supposed to care for something and something so precious, too? Because I don’t ever want it to get misconstrued. I think children and babies, they are precious, they’re innocent. But also we have to make sure we’re making good choices, that we can care for these people in a way that supports them, and they go on to have these healthy, happy lives.
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SN: Is this experience what motivated you to do the work you do now?
JS: It was absolutely. I mean, my personal experience, and then the experiences of the people around me, the experiences of even my mom. She got pregnant at a very young age. Her mom got pregnant at a young age. So, all of it plays a part into why I feel like being a doula, but also just supporting people in all aspects of pregnancy — and in even the termination of pregnancy — is something I’m supposed to be doing.
SN: What has it been like as a doula in this moment and since Dobbs?
JS: I think it’s changed more the doula, just with the information that now people know that I stand for both sides of it. So I am 100%, “We’re gonna have a baby. Let’s do this.” But there’s also that side where it’s like, “I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t feel like I’m ready to have a baby.” And as an abortion doula, “Okay, so let’s work through that. Like, what do you feel like the next steps are for you?” So it’s definitely changed that the people that I encounter are more comfortable with voicing, “Maybe I don’t want to have a baby right now and I am already pregnant again. So what do I do?”
SN: In your work, have you encountered any effects of the 12-week ban?
JS: I’ve definitely had to work with a few individuals, to work through the emotions that come with, “OK, so I do have to go through with this pregnancy. This is not what I had planned. And now, I’m past 12 weeks; what options do I have?” In those scenarios, unfortunately your option is you have to go through with this pregnancy. I don’t see that as fair. I believe that baby should be welcomed into the world, loved from the beginning instead of unsure of.
SN: One thing that I’ve heard talking to people throughout the country, especially in states where abortion is nearly or fully banned, is people saying they don’t have enough time to make the right decision. Can you speak to that?
JS: A lot of women don’t find out they’re pregnant until about between six to eight weeks, and at that point, that leaves you a little less than a month, or a little over a month to make a decision that completely impacts and changes your entire life.
SN: What does some of your work for the Protect Our Rights campaign look like?
JS: I stay informed. I do let people know, when I’m out in public, about the campaign, especially during the petition-signing. I made sure that I was on the lookout for any petitions that were in an attempt to discredit what we were doing or spreading misinformation about our initiative.
SN: What do you mean by that?
JS: I was approached often, just being out in public, if I wanted to sign the petition, and just hearing how people were describing it, or like, you know, spreading the information about which petition was which, and me knowing the facts, like, “Oh no, that’s not the petition that you’re leading it on to be; yours is the opposite.”
Sofia Resnick/States Newsroom
SN: What is your confidence like heading into November? Do you feel like it’s a competitive race between the two campaigns?
JS: I feel very confident. I don’t feel like it’s a competitive race. There’s a lot of people that have volunteered, hundreds of volunteers. You know, we’ve had over 200,000 signatures from every county in the state. So I know that this is something that a lot of people believe in.
SN: Is there anything you can pull out from your work as a doula, from either a wanted pregnancy or one that was unexpected, to kind of illustrate — you know, there’s all this talk about how the end of Roe is going to inform the election and all of that, but what does it really mean on a human level?
JS: I think a lot of people think of an abortion as something that is carelessly done. There’s a lot of thought that comes into it, regardless of when it is, when it happens, or how it has to happen, even if it’s medically induced.
And there’s also those that don’t go through with it and they are fine. And then there’s those that go through with it and they can’t handle it. But it’s always that personal decision. You know, it’s different when you’re able to make your decisions for your life and no one else has intervened, and you feel that power still that this is what I did because this is what I needed to do for me at the time.”
SN: Can you clarify what you mean by “go through with it”?
JS: Go through with an abortion and or not go through with the abortion. Either way, you feel big emotions. There is a period of grief that happens after an abortion, and sometimes it lasts just like if someone were to pass away in your life. It lasts a while. There’s a lot of things that you have to cope with after an abortion, and that is OK, because we are all human, and we have emotions, regardless of how and why we make certain decisions.
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