Conservatives clash with Trump on leaving abortion up to voters

Former President Donald Trump is calling for abortion access to be left to the people of each state, and Republican candidates up and down the ballot are falling in line.

But that stance is in direct conflict with conservative lawmakers’ and activists’ efforts to keep abortion-rights initiatives off state ballots.

Their array of tactics includes several bills and ballot measures that would raise the signature-gathering or vote threshold for changing state constitutions, lawsuits to block the initiatives, bureaucratic maneuvers to insert anti-abortion language into the proposals, and street-level confrontations to dissuade voters from signing petitions to put abortion on the ballot.

The gulf between Trump’s “let that be to the states” view and the anti-abortion movement’s efforts underscores divisions that have dogged conservatives for two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

“This near-term utilitarian, means-to-an-end, political-expediency type of stance that many in the Republican Party have taken, marginalizes the unborn and undermines this cause of justice,” said Jesse Southerland, the federal policy director of Americans United for Life. “We don’t get to choose who lives and dies. Human rights for women and the unborn shouldn’t be up for a vote.”

Abortion-rights measures have won overwhelmingly every time they have been on the ballot since the Dobbs decision in 2022, fueling calls on the right to take the matter out of voters’ hands and exacerbating tensions between Trump and the movement that helped carry him to the White House in 2016.

Some abortion opponents argue it should be harder to change the state’s constitution, a process they see as too vulnerable to influence from out-of-state groups. Others insist that such referendums shouldn’t happen in the first place.

“President Trump says that abortion should come down to the ‘will of the people,’” said Lila Rose, founder of the anti-abortion group Live Action. “It is not right for democratic societies to vote on the fundamental rights of unpopular minorities. There is no more unpopular minority today than preborn Americans. Abortion is not about the ‘will of the people,’ it’s about respecting the human right that we are endowed with by our creator.”

Rose said Trump’s new stance means he can’t credibly call himself pro-life anymore. But even anti-abortion groups that praised Trump’s abortion statement, including Students for Life of America, dispute his call to leave the issue up to states, arguing that the federal government is already deeply involved in ways that range from FDA regulation of abortion pills to funding for Planned Parenthood and thus has both the right and the obligation to curb access.

Democrats and abortion-rights activists, meanwhile, are dismissing Trump’s “will of the people” call as empty rhetoric in light of the GOP’s attempts to stymie state referendums on abortion access.

“When he made that statement on Monday, I nearly spit out my water,” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of The Fairness Project, which is funding and advising several different abortion-rights ballot measure campaigns. “It is certainly not consistent with the behavior of his fellow conservatives across the country.”

Additionally, progressives stress, the leave-it-to-states line obscures the fact that roughly half of states don’t allow citizens to collect signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, meaning millions of people in Texas, the Carolinas and other states with abortion bans have no way to put forward a referendum to overturn them. But for many conservatives, who believe it’s better for elected legislators to set abortion policy than a popular vote, this is a feature and not a bug.

“People can engage their legislators — that is called the democratic process. That’s why we have this whole checks-and-balances system,” said Susan Haugland, an activist with Arizona Right to Life. “But when you put something so radical and so extreme in the Constitution, to get that overturned is practically impossible.”

In Arizona, the GOP-controlled legislature approved a measure for the November ballot that would make it harder for citizen-led constitutional amendments to get before voters. The proposed rule would not only require hundreds of thousands of signatures, but also a certain number from each congressional district. Republican lawmakers also introduced bills to require a 60 percent supermajority vote to pass ballot measures, and to make it easier for voters to challenge ballot initiatives in court before an election.

Arizona voters’ ability to weigh in on abortion policy has taken new significance in the wake of a state supreme court decision upholding an 1864 law that prohibits the procedure at any stage of pregnancy, with no exemptions for rape or incest, and with mandatory prison time for doctors who don’t comply. Abortion-rights groups are on their way to collecting the signatures needed to put a measure on the November ballot restoring abortion access up to fetal viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.

In Missouri, which also has a ballot measure campaign underway aiming to overturn the state’s near-total abortion ban, GOP officials have introduced nearly two dozen bills this year to make the process harder.

One requires initiatives to win a majority of votes in each congressional district. Another would require a ballot initiative to win support from a majority of registered voters in the state rather than a majority of the votes cast in that election. Another would require a two-thirds majority for passage. Others would dictate the font type, font size and margin width signature-gatherers need to use on their forms, bar out-of-state volunteers from collecting signatures, and make it harder for formerly incarcerated people to collect signatures.

“They are coming up with new tricks,” Hall said of the Missouri proposals, a trend she attributes to voters rejecting straightforward attempts to raise the ballot initiative vote threshold from a majority to 60 percent in Arkansas, Ohio and South Dakota over the last two years. “There’s a new creativity that we’re seeing, and we see that creativity as a way of confusing voters.

Yet Republican state Rep. Brad Hudson and other conservatives are defending the efforts as a reasonable response to the threat of a ballot measure overriding the state’s current ban, and pushing back against Trump’s call to leave the issue to voters.

“I know of no president that has done more for the pro-life cause and the pro-life community than President Trump, but when we talk about the state of Missouri, and the fact that we’ve got the real possibility of something being put on the ballot that would endanger those unborn lives, I think that is immoral, wrong, unconstitutional, and I’m doing what I can to fight it,” he told POLITICO.

In Florida, which has a 60 percent threshold for ballot measures, GOP lawmakers are considering raising it to two-thirds. In North Dakota, lawmakers approved a measure for the November ballot that would require constitutional amendments to pass in both the primary and general election to become law. And in Mississippi, where a court struck down the state’s ballot initiative process in 2021, GOP lawmakers debated restoring it with a carveout barring abortion-related measures. That effort failed, leaving voters without the ability to pursue ballot measures on any subject.

Even when these GOP efforts fail to block ballot initiatives, progressive backers of the measures warn that the monthslong fights are delaying the start of signature collection and campaigning, raising fears that they will run out of time as summer deadlines loom.

In Montana, for example, the state Supreme Court recently ruled that proposed ballot language to protect abortion rights did not bundle multiple subjects together and that Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen overstepped his authority when he argued the measure was confusing and would conflict with other parts of the state constitution. But abortion-rights groups had to wait to launch their campaign until the legal fight concluded last week, leaving them only a few months to get more than 60,000 signatures.

“It has eaten up a lot of time and resources, and that makes it hard to do the signature gathering, educate the public, and do all the parts we need to do to be successful,” said Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “So, it’s frankly silly to say that Republicans want to leave abortion to the states. Every single place where we’re working to allow voters to decide directly, elected officials from the AG down to the state legislature twist themselves in knots in order to not let voters have a say.”

Megan Messerly contributed to this report.