CHICAGO– Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are trying to prevent voters from having a say on abortion rights, building on anti-abortion strategies seen in other states, including Ohio last year.
Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the efforts are evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undermine democratic processes designed to give voters a direct role in shaping state laws.
“They are afraid of the people and their voices, so their response is to keep their voices from being heard,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “There’s nothing democratic about that, and it’s the same blueprint. we’ve seen it over and over again in Ohio and all these other states.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion in 2022, voters in seven states have protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to restrict them with statewide ballot measures. Democrats have pledged to make the issue a central campaign issue for races up and down the ballot this year.
A proposal passed by the Mississippi House on Wednesday would ban residents from placing abortion initiatives on the statewide ballot. Mississippi has one of the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions, banning the procedure except to save the woman’s life or in cases of rape or incest.
In response to the bill, Democratic Rep. Cheikh Taylor said direct democracy “should not include conditions.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you this is just about abortion,” Taylor said. “This is about a Republican Party that thinks it knows what’s best for you better than you know what’s best for you. This is about control. So much for freedom and limited government.”
The resolution is an attempt to revive Mississippi’s ballot initiative process, which has been dormant since 2021, when the state Supreme Court ruled that the process was invalid because it required people to collect signatures from the state’s five previous counties US House of Representatives. Mississippi dropped to four counties after the 2000 census, but the initiative language was never updated.
Republican Rep. Fred Shanks said Republicans in the House of Representatives would not have passed the resolution, which will soon go to the Senate, without the abortion exemption. Some Republicans in the House of Representatives said voters should not vote on changing abortion laws because Mississippi filed the lawsuit that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“It took 50 years … to overturn Roe v. Wade,” said Mississippi House Speaker Jason White, a Republican. “We weren’t going to just let it be thrown out the window by people coming from out of state, spending $50 million and passing an initiative.”
But Mississippi Democrats and abortion access organizations have panned the exemption as a restriction on the people’s voice.
“This is a deeply undemocratic way to harm access to reproductive health care,” said Sofia Tomov, operations coordinator at Access Reproductive Care Southeast, a member of the Mississippi Abortion Access Coalition. “It infringes on people’s ability to participate in the democratic process. ”
In Missouri, one of several states where an abortion rights initiative could go before voters in the fall, a plan backed by anti-abortion groups would require initiatives to win a majority vote in five of eight state’s congressional districts, in addition to a simple statewide majority.
The proposal comes days after an abortion rights campaign in Missouri launched its ballot initiative with the aim of enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution. Abortion rights groups in Missouri have also criticized Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, saying he is trying to hinder the initiative by manipulating the measure’s voting record. A Missouri appeals court recently ruled that the summaries were politically biased and misleading.
When asked at a recent committee hearing whether the Republican proposal was an attempt to get rid of direct democracy, Republican state Rep. Ed Lewis said, “I think our founding fathers were about as afraid of direct democracy as we should be . That’s why they created a republic.”
Sam Lee, a lobbyist for Campaign Life Missouri, testified Tuesday about the need for these types of provisions that ensure “minority rights are not trampled.”
“The concern of our founders, and the concern of many people over the decades and years, is to avoid a tyranny of the majority,” he said.
Democratic Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo said controlling who can vote and on what issues “has been the top priority of the Republican Party for the past 20 years.”
“This is how democracies die,” he said in an interview. “We are monitoring it in real time. This is the scariest moment I have seen in my life.”
Democratic Rep. Joe Adams criticized the plan in part by claiming that the state’s congressional and legislative districts favor Republicans. That would make it virtually impossible for an abortion measure to pass under the proposed legislation.
Efforts to keep abortion measures off the ballot in Missouri and Mississippi follow a similar blueprint in other states and focus on the ballot initiative process, a form of direct democracy available to voters in only about half of states.
Florida’s Republican attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to keep a proposed abortion rights amendment off the ballot, as an abortion rights coalition reached the necessary number of signatures this month to make it eligible for the ballot in 2024.
In Nevada, a judge on Tuesday approved an abortion rights ballot petition eligible for signature gathering, crushing a legal challenge from anti-abortion groups that sought to prevent the issue from getting before voters.
Abortion rights advocates in Ohio have said that last year’s statewide vote to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution was as much about abortion as it was a referendum on democracy itself. They said Republicans tried to obstruct the democratic process before the vote and tried to ignore the will of voters after the amendment passed.
Ohio Republicans called a special election in August in an effort to raise the threshold for passing future constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. That effort was rejected at the polls and was widely seen as an attempt to undermine the abortion amendment.
After Ohio voters approved abortion protections last year, Republican lawmakers vowed to block the amendment to overturn the state’s restrictions. Some suggested blocking Ohio courts from interpreting matters related to the amendment.
“It wasn’t just about abortion,” Deirdre Schifeling, the ACLU’s chief political and advocacy officer, said last fall after the Ohio amendment passed. “It’s about: ‘Will the majority be heard?’”
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Associated Press writers Summer Ballentine in Jefferson City, Missouri, and Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi, contributed to this report.
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