Abortion Is On The Ballot in Arizona

Arizona has a long and proud history of independence. Arizona women, in particular, have been trailblazers, beginning with securing the right to vote in 1912, eight years before the 19th Amendment gave that right to women at the federal level. Arizona is the first and only state to have had five female governors and is second only to Nevada in the percentage of women serving in the state legislature. 

And yet, when it comes to women being free to make our own decisions about pregnancy and abortion, state law has banned abortion to varying degrees since at least 1864. 

Today, the vast majority of Arizonans support the freedom to make their own health care decisions about pregnancy and abortion with their doctors, but extremist politicians have imposed dangerous abortion bans that put politicians, not women, in control of reproductive health care. 

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Arizona had two abortion bans already on the books: an 1864 total ban that criminalized the procedure and threatened violaters with jail time, and the other passed in 2022 with no exceptions for rape, incest or health complications. When the Court replaced Roe with Dobbs, doctors in Arizona immediately halted their work and Arizonans lost access to health care they had relied on for half a century. 

For months, Arizonans were denied basic health care while clinics and health care providers shut down and limited services, unclear what was legal, what would and wouldn’t put their licenses in jeopardy and what alternatives they could offer patients in need. Eventually, some Arizona abortion providers and women’s health care facilities began offering highly restricted abortion care hamstrung by a number of additional, non-medically-sound mandates from the government. But some clinics never reopened and still others never returned to their full range of services, too uncertain about when the law would change again or whose interpretation of the law would reign supreme if a service was in doubt. 

Arizona patients paid the price. 

In 1983, when Nicole was raped at 11 years old, she was too young to understand the signs of pregnancy for herself. Her mother noticed she was pregnant and together they got her the abortion care she needed. Today, under Arizona’s current overly restrictive abortion ban, a childhood rape victim would be forced to give birth to her attacker’s child. 

In 2020, Morgan was pregnant with twins when she learned that one fetus was not viable. Unable to get the specialized abortion she needed in Arizona, Morgan and her husband had to leave the state to get the procedure she needed. Without access to in-state reproductive health care services, Morgan’s and her daughter’s lives were both put at risk. 

What we’ve seen over the past two years is that reproductive freedom and the right to bodily autonomy transcends political partisanship.

In 2023, when Ashley was 20 weeks pregnant with her first child, she learned the fetus would not survive. Rather than giving her the medical care she needed, under Arizona’s current abortion ban she was forced to wait for days for the fetus to die and her own body to develop serious medical problems before Arizona doctors were allowed to give her care. What should have been a simple procedure took triple the amount of time and was significantly more complex because her health care team was forced by law to delay her care.

It is stories like these, and so many others, that make this the issue that will define Arizona’s election cycle.

Arizona is one of a handful of states that allows constitutional amendments through the citizen ballot initiative process and so, in the summer of 2023, a coalition of statewide and national organizations with a commitment to reproductive freedom and voting rights came together to create Arizona for Abortion Access with the goal of using direct democracy to restore and expand the rights that the U.S. Supreme Court and the state government had taken away. 

Proposition 139 the Arizona Abortion Access Act would:

1. Establish a fundamental right to abortion, 
2. Prevent the government from passing laws that restrict access to abortion health care before fetal viability,
3. Protect access to abortion after fetal viability if the health care provider determines an abortion is needed to protect the life or health of the patient and finally
4. Prevent the state from penalizing someone assisting a patient who seeks abortion care.

Prop. 139 preserves health and safety standards and returns control of reproductive decisions to women and their doctors.  

And so, in the fall of 2023, more than 7,000 volunteers fanned out across the state to collect signatures to get the Arizona Abortion Access Act on the ballot in November. After several months of extremely successful signature-collecting, we submitted the largest number of signatures ever for a citizens’ initiative. One in five Arizonans signed this petition, representing every county, every background and every political party. Arizonans have loudly said that they want to decide this issue directly, for themselves. 

Arizona is a competitive battleground state, but what we’ve seen over the past two years is that reproductive freedom and the right to bodily autonomy transcends political partisanship. Arizonans know that the decision of when and how to create a family is one of the most personal and intimate sets of decisions people make and that the state’s current abortion ban is dangerous. This is why we are proud to bring this issue directly to the people of Arizona so they can reclaim their rights through the power of direct democracy. 

We made history once already, and we will make history again in November by enshrining a right to abortion in our state’s constitution, preserving the patient-doctor relationship and getting government out of the way.

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Dawn Penich, Ph.D. is the communications director for Arizona for Abortion Access.