Millions of voters across ten states will be directly weighing in on abortion through ballot initiatives come Election Day on Nov. 5—in what has become a historic push by reproductive healthcare advocates to reverse the impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade.
The 2024 campaign cycle, the first presidential race since the Dobbs decision upended federal protections for abortion, has been punctuated by reproductive freedom.
Republicans, including former president Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, have been attempting to appeal to the majority of voters that support access to abortion by rewriting their histories of restricting reproductive freedoms.
High-profile Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have been speaking about abortion in starker terms than ever before. (Lest we remember the website dedicated to President Joe Biden not saying the word “abortion.”)
Nationally, Americans have shared personal stories through social media, in political advertisements, and on courtroom floors about their reproductive healthcare needs, their past pregnancy-related traumas, and how the coordinated effort to roll back protections has impacted their lives and livelihoods.
For millions of voters going to the polls this week, abortion is the number one issue on their minds. According to recent polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation, four in ten women voters under 30 now say abortion is their most important issue. And, this is true in swing states, too. A New York Times/Siena College set of polls of registered voters in seven battleground states from August found that for women younger than 45, abortion had overtaken the economy as the single most important issue to their vote.
These 11 ballot measures across 10 states—Nebraska has two dueling questions for voters to weigh in on—are historic. There has never been this many simultaneous chances for voters to have their say on reproductive freedoms. The referendums differ in language, exceptions, and scope of protections. Some, like the ones in Colorado and New York, seek to deepen and secure established rights to abortion. While others, like those on the ballots in Florida and Arizona, hope to reverse bans made possible because of Dobbs.
Since five Supreme Court justices—three of whom Trump appointed—voted to overturn Roe in 2022, about half of all states currently have stricter restrictions on abortion than they did pre-Dobbs. Thirteen states outright ban abortion; four states have six-week bans, before many people even know they’re pregnant; and out of the states with abortion bans or gestational limits, ten do not have exceptions for pregnancies resulting from sexual assault.
These statewide bans have resulted in an America where 21% of women ages 18-49, who live in states with bans, say that they or someone they know has struggled to access an abortion because of those restrictions, according to polling from KFF.
As ProPublica has reported, lack of access to reproductive care paired with confusion around who qualifies for slim medical exceptions to abortion bans has culminated in the known deaths of multiple women. Just this week, the ProPublica team told the story of Nevaeh Crain, a pregnant teenager from Texas who died after screening positive for sepsis and being sent back home because her fetus still had a heartbeat.
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