CHICAGO – Legislative efforts in Missouri and Mississippi are trying to prevent voters from having a say on abortion rights, building on anti-abortion strategies seen in other states, including last year in Ohio.
Democrats and abortion rights advocates say the effort is evidence that Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents are trying to undermine the democratic process meant to give voters a direct role in shaping state laws.
“They’re afraid of people and their voices, so their response is to prevent their voices from being heard,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “There’s nothing democratic about that, and it’s the same blueprint we’re seeing in Ohio and all these other states, over and over again.”
Since the Supreme Court struck down constitutional rights to abortion in 2022, voters in seven states have either protected abortion rights or defeated attempts to block them in statewide ballots.
Democrats have promised to make the issue a major campaign topic this year for both up-and-down-ballot races.
A proposal passed Wednesday by the Mississippi House would prohibit residents from placing abortion initiatives on the statewide ballot.
Mississippi State Representative Fred Shanks with a copy of a proposed resolution that would prohibit residents from placing abortion initiatives on the statewide ballot. AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File
Mississippi has among the toughest abortion restrictions in the country, with the procedure banned except to save the woman’s life or in cases of rape or incest.
In response to the bill, Rep. Democrat Cheikh Taylor said direct democracy “shouldn’t include terms and conditions.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you it’s only about abortion,” Taylor said. “This is about the Republican Party thinking they know what’s best for you better than you know what’s best for you. It’s about control. So much for freedom and limited government.”
The resolution is an attempt to revive the ballot initiative process in Mississippi, which has been absent since 2021 when the state Supreme Court ruled that the process was invalid because it required people to gather signatures from the state’s previous five House districts.
Mississippi dropped to four counties after the 2000 census, but the initiative language was never updated.
Mississippi State Representative Robert Johnson offered an amendment to the resolution proposed by state Republicans. AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File
Rep. Republican Fred Shanks said House Republicans would not pass the resolution, which will soon head to the Senate, without an abortion exception.
Several members of the House of Representatives said voters should not be allowed to vote to change abortion laws because Mississippi started a legal case that overturned Roe v. Wade.
“It took 50 years … to overturn Roe v. Wade,” said Mississippi House Speaker Jason White, a Republican. “We’re not going to let it be thrown away by people coming in from out of state, spending 50 million dollars and running an initiative.”
But Mississippi Democrats and abortion access organizations blasted the exemption as limiting people’s voice.
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“This is a very undemocratic way to jeopardize access to reproductive health care,” said Sofia Tomov, operations coordinator with Access Reproductive Care Southeast, a member of the Mississippi Abortion Access Coalition. “It violates people’s ability to participate in the democratic process.”
In Missouri, one of the few states where an abortion-rights initiative can go before voters in the fall, a plan backed by anti-abortion groups would require the initiative to win a majority vote in five of the state’s eight congressional districts, in addition to a majority in the whole country.
The proposal comes days after the Missouri abortion rights campaign launched its ballot measure efforts aimed at enshrining abortion rights into the state constitution.
Missouri abortion rights groups have also criticized Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, saying he is trying to block the initiative by manipulating the measure’s vote summary.
A Missouri appeals court recently found the summary to be politically partisan and misleading.
People attend a rally for abortion rights in Kansas City, Missouri on July 2, 2022. AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File
When asked during a recent committee hearing whether the GOP proposal was an attempt to get rid of direct democracy, Rep. Republican Ed Lewis said “I think our founding fathers were as afraid of direct democracy as they should have been. That’s why they created a republic.”
Sam Lee, a lobbyist for Campaign Life Missouri, testified Tuesday about the need for provisions like these that ensure “minority rights are not trampled on.”
“The concern of our founders, and the concern of many people throughout the decades and years, was to avoid the tyranny of the majority,” he said.
Democratic Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo said controlling who can vote and on which subjects has been “the highest priority of the Republican Party for the last 20 years.”
“This is how democracy dies,” he said in an interview. “We watch it in real time. This is the scariest moment I have ever seen in my life.”
Rep. Democrat Joe Adams criticized the plan in part by claiming that the state’s congressional and legislative districts were ordered to favor Republicans. That would make it nearly impossible for an abortion measure to pass under the proposed law.
Attempts to keep abortion measures off the ballot in Missouri and Mississippi follow similar blueprints in other states to target the ballot initiative process, a form of direct democracy available to voters in only about half the states.
Florida’s Republican attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to keep a proposed abortion rights amendment off the ballot as the abortion rights coalition this month reached the number of signatures needed to qualify it for the 2024 ballot.
In Nevada, a judge on Tuesday approved an abortion-rights ballot measure petition as eligible for signature gathering, rejecting a legal challenge by anti-abortion groups trying to prevent the question from being put to voters.
Ohio abortion rights advocates say last year’s statewide vote to keep abortion rights in the state constitution is as much about abortion as it is a referendum on democracy itself.
They said Republicans tried to obstruct the democratic process before the vote and tried to ignore the will of the voters after the amendment was passed.
Ohio Republicans held a special election in August attempting to raise the threshold for passing future constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%.
The effort was defeated at the polls and was widely seen as aimed at undermining the abortion amendment.
After Ohio voters approved abortion protections last year, Republican lawmakers vowed to block the amendment from overturning state restrictions.
oSme proposed to prevent Ohio courts from interpreting any cases related to the amendment.
“It’s not just about abortion,” said Deirdre Schifeling, the ACLU’s chief policy and advocacy officer, last fall after Ohio’s amendment passed. “It’s about, ‘Is the majority heard?'”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
