It Was a Huge Night for Abortion Rights — Even in Kentucky
“The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” Associate Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion striking down 50 years of federal protection for abortion earlier this year. The words unleashed chaos across the U.S., casting patients and providers into legal limbo. By election day, abortion was inaccessible in more than a quarter of the country, thanks to pre-existing laws that went into effect following the Court’s decision.
Now, the citizens have finally had their say: in all five of the states where abortion rights were on the ballot — including the ruby red commonwealth of Kentucky — voters have fortified protections and rejected measures that would have led to new restrictions on the procedure.
Voters in Vermont and California both moved to enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitutions — victories that, given the states’ political compositions, were not particularly surprising. But Michigan followed suit as well, passing a measure that not only protects a woman’s right to make reproductive decisions, it prohibits prosecution for exercising that right for any reason. The measure also, importantly, invalidates any state laws that may conflict with it. That means that an existing 1931 abortion law on the books in Michigan, which the members of the state’s GOP-led House and certain local prosecutors were itching to enforce, will be nullified.
Even more consequential, however, was the triumph for reproductive rights in Kentucky, where abortion has been illegal since the Supreme Court’s decision in June. According to local projections, voters in Kentucky soundly rejected an initiative that would have stripped protections from their constitution and paved the way for lawmakers to further restrict the procedure. Rachel Sweet, campaign manager for Protect Kentucky Access, the group that worked to defeat the proposed amendment, called the win “historic.”
“Not only does it represent a win against government overreach and government interference in the people of Kentucky’s personal medical decisions, it represents the first time so many different organizations have come together with such an intense single-minded purpose to defeat a threat of this magnitude,” Sweet said in a statement. “Kentuckians have spoken, and politicians in Frankfort will have to listen.”
The impact of the result in Kentucky can’t be understated: medical providers previously mounted a legal challenge to the state’s trigger ban and its a six-week abortion ban, but Kentucky’s Supreme Court said it would not hear arguments on the case until after the election. (Another win for advocates in the state: Joseph Fischer, a former Republican lawmaker and one of the key figures behind the state’s extreme anti-abortion legislation, lost his campaign for a Supreme Court seat.)
By Thursday, the last and most surprising results were finally in: Montana voters rejected the “Medical Care Requirements for Born-Alive Infants” measure — a pre-Dobbs throwback that was to be ratified after it passed the state legislature in 2021. The law would have impose fines and jail time on doctors or nurses who provided palliative care to newborns with no chance of survival. Medical professionals in the state came out against the proposed measure, saying it would prevent them from doing their jobs and inflict needless pain on parents.
From this side of Tuesday’s election, it’s clear that overwhelming majorities of voters want abortion protections. But it wasn’t not all good news for the supporters of reproductive rights: anti-abortion ballot measures may have been swatted down by voters, but a slew of extremists officials were elected and re-elected around the country, including Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida, Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas, Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, and Eric Schmitt, the newes senator from Missouri.