The New Yorker:

Voters are amending their state constitutions to protect reproductive freedom—and discovering the limitations of these measures in the post-Dobbs era.

By Jessica Winter

In the first Presidential race since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the American electorate appeared to stake out two seemingly irreconcilable positions. Voters gave a mandate to Donald Trump, who appointed half of the conservative supermajority that abolished the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Yet, at the same time, eight states showed majority support for constitutional amendments that codified abortion rights, including five states that went for or are leaning toward Trump. In Missouri, where abortions are completely prohibited except for health emergencies, Trump won easily, but so did an amendment enshrining reproductive rights in the state constitution. Trump is poised to win in Arizona, which has a fifteen-week ban, and where voters affirmed an amendment protecting abortion rights until fetal viability. A similar measure in Trump’s home state of Florida, Amendment 4, won a slightly larger majority than Trump himself did—and yet the measure failed, because it did not reach Florida’s sixty-per-cent threshold for passing constitutional amendments. The South Florida Sun Sentinel, reporting on a ballot initiative that received fifty-seven per cent of the vote, ran the headline “Voters Reject Florida Abortion Rights Amendment.”

Florida, in fact, provides a vivid microcosm of large swaths of the U.S., where solid majorities back both reproductive freedom and the man who helped take it away. In Kamala Harris’s campaign against Trump, abortion rights were the Vice-President’s strongest issue. The fury and horror that many voters felt over the Dobbs decision powered the Democrats’ surprisingly robust showing in the 2022 midterms, with Harris’s command of the subject compensating for Joe Biden’s Catholic squeamishness. In March, Harris went to St. Paul, Minnesota, to visit an abortion clinic, something that no President or Vice-President had ever done before. “So everyone get ready for the language: uterus,” Harris said to reporters during the event. “That part of the body needs a lot of medical care from time to time.” Harris’s passion and candor on reproductive rights was well matched to the broad support for this year’s ballot initiatives, but it did not translate into broader support for the candidate herself. She won just forty-three per cent of the Florida vote—five points below Biden’s statewide result in 2020.

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