Abortion Rights Are On The Ballot This Election Day

By Danielle Campoamor, Prism

On the eve of a potentially historic presidential election, Natasha Sutherland is tired. The born-and-raised Floridian and senior advisor to the Yes on 4 campaign has been fighting to expand and protect abortion access in her home state for years, but that fight hit a fever pitch after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

“We knew that lawmakers in the state of Florida were going to implement an abortion ban,” Sutherland said. “And we knew there was something we had to do about it—we knew [a ban] would be an immense and significant loss of care both to the state of Florida and the global South.”

Florida is just one of 10 states with ballot measures that will give voters the opportunity to enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions. Since the fall of Roe, 21 states have banned or severely restricted abortion—and the consequences have been far-reaching. A recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that infant mortality rates have risen in states with total or near-total abortion bans. In Texas, where abortion is banned with no exceptions for rape or incest, maternal mortality rose by 56%. In Georgia, at least two women so far—Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller—have died as a result of the state’s six-week abortion ban.

Meanwhile, the post-Roe crisis is forcing patients with means to travel out of state for abortion, prenatal, and miscarriage management care, resulting in backlogs in states where abortion rights are protected. In 2023 alone, 171,000 women traveled to another state to receive abortion care.

These ballot measures, organizers and advocates hope, could bring back abortion access to what has become an “abortion and maternal care desert.”

With the writing on the proverbial wall after the draft of the Dobbs decision leaked, Sutherland and other organizers from Floridians Protecting Freedom immediately got to work—creating partnerships with the ACLU of Florida, Planned Parenthood, Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, Florida Rising, and more. The collective began drafting amendment language and collecting signatures for ballot measure Amendment 4, which would prohibit the government from outlawing, penalizing, delaying, or restricting abortion care before fetal viability.