Nevada campaigners for reproductive rights said on Monday that they have enough signatures to add abortion rights to the state’s constitution through an amendment that will be on the ballot in November.
The group behind the effort, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, said it sent the Nevada Secretary of state’s office more than 200,000 signatures in support of the possible election measure. The signatures will now be checked to make sure they are real. If the measure passes, voters will be able to say that the state’s law clearly protects abortion, which would protect most forms of reproductive care from attacks by the legislature.
The number of signatures sent in is almost twice as many as the 102,362 needed to move forward with the vote qualification process. The application was made more than a month before the due date of June 26.
At a news gathering to announce the victory, Lindsey Harmon, president of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, said, “The number of signatures gathered in just over three months shows how deeply Nevadans believe in abortion rights and how important they are to this time in our nation’s history.”
Advocates for the change hold up signs at a news gathering in Las Vegas on Monday.
The swing state’s voters passed a law in 1990 that lets women have abortions up to 24 weeks into a pregnancy. This is about the time when a fetus can live on its own outside the womb. Harmon said that making sure people in Nevada can get an abortion is more important than ever because lawmakers in nearby states have made it harder to get one.
Because of the end of Roe v. Wade, she said, “Nevada is now surrounded by states with abortion bans.” “We know that these attacks will keep happening.”
Constitutional changes are the best way to protect abortion rights from future attacks, according to a doctor who spoke at a news gathering on Monday.
An internal medicine doctor named Dr. Harpreet Tsui said, “We know that 30-year protections aren’t enough in a world after Roe. That’s why we’re making sure that our freedoms are constitutionally protected.”
“Our right to choose how to have children can’t be left up to political whims,” she said.
It has been the goal of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom since last summer to get the amendment on the ballot, following the lead of voters in California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont, who all chose to make abortion legal in their state constitutions after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Voters in Kansas and Kentucky, two very red states, have recently turned down attempts to say that their constitutions don’t support the right to have an abortion.
A 2021 poll found that almost seven in ten Nevada voters supported the ballot proposal. If it is approved, it has a good chance of passing in that state.
Access to abortion is still very popular across the country, even though the GOP is trying to make it look bad. Pew Research poll released last week found that 63% of Americans believe abortion should be allowed in all or most cases. This is an increase of 4% since 2021. Two-thirds of middle and liberal Republicans agreed with that point of view, the poll found.
