Voters in Montana will decide in November whether to enshrine a right to abortion in the state Constitution, joining eight other states with similar citizen-sponsored questions on their ballots.
Montana’s secretary of state sent an email late Tuesday to the coalition of abortion rights groups sponsoring the measure, certifying that they had collected enough valid signatures to place it on the ballot. The coalition had submitted more than 117,000 signatures, nearly double the 60,039 required and the most submitted for a ballot measure in Montana history.
And in Arizona — which, like Montana, was facing a Thursday deadline to certify its ballots — the state’s Supreme Court rejected an appeal late Tuesday from anti-abortion groups trying to strike a similar measure that the secretary of state there had approved last week. The justices, all appointed by Republicans, said that their decision did not signal support for the measure, only that they did not agree with the technical objection raised by the anti-abortion groups about the language used on ballot petitions.
National Democrats and abortion rights groups are pouring money into ballot measures in both states in the hopes that they can drive turnout to help the Democrats running for the Senate, where the party holds a razor-thin majority. In Montana, Senator Jon Tester is perhaps the party’s most endangered incumbent.
Abortion remains legal in Montana until viability — the point when a fetus can survive outside the uterus, generally around 24 weeks of pregnancy — because of a 1999 state Supreme Court decision that said the right to privacy in the state Constitution included a right to “procreative autonomy.”
Advocates say the measure is necessary to prevent future members of the court, who are elected, from reversing that decision. And the state’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, and the Republican-controlled Legislature have repeatedly tried to ban or restrict abortion.
In each state, the measure would amend the state Constitution to prohibit the state from banning abortion before viability and would allow limited restrictions after that.
Even Republicans in Montana say they expect the measure to pass, with polls showing that a majority of residents believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The governor, the attorney general and the secretary of state have tried repeatedly to block the amendment from appearing on the ballot.
Most recently, the secretary of state changed election software to strike “inactive voters” — those who are registered but who had not voted in the most recent federal election — instructing county election clerks not to count them. The Supreme Court ordered her to count those signatures, saying she had improperly tried to change electoral law when she disqualified them.
“We know extreme anti-abortion politicians in Montana will continue to deceive voters in an attempt to take away our rights,” said Akilah Deernose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, which is part of the coalition, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights. “We will continue to fight for the rights of Montanans to participate in their democracy and make their voices heard.”
Voters have sided with abortion rights groups in all seven states where ballot measures on abortion have appeared in the two years since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had found a right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.
Montana is one of those states. In 2022, voters rejected a ballot measure that would have required doctors to provide medical care after premature births and abortions where the fetus was “born alive.” Opponents of the measure argued that the law already requires doctors to provide lifesaving care and that the measure was intended to stoke fears about abortions late in pregnancy.
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