Well ... The Abortion Amendments Did Well, Mostly, We Guess
Seven out of 10 ain't bad. Solid C minus!
It’s hard to feel like cheering for anything this morning at all, or trying to see any silver linings anywhere. Mostly because even those silver linings feel pretty fucking grey considering everything else. But hey! The abortion ballot measures didn’t do too bad in comparison to the garbage fire that was literally everything else that happened last night.
LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE.
In Colorado, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, and New York, voters elected to enshrine their current abortion-rights laws into their state constitutions — so that future lawmakers with nefarious intentions can’t mess with them. So that’s nice!
In Arizona and Missouri, voters elected to get rid of their current statutes against abortion and to protect the right to abortion until fetal viability. That’s awesome! We should all be really, really glad about that, once we can bring ourselves to be glad about anything.
On the down side, this will be the first time so far that abortion measures were defeated in an election — most resoundingly in South Dakota, where a measure to undo the state’s near-total abortion ban and enshrine the right to at least some abortions in the constitution failed pretty miserably.
Amendment G would have made abortion legal in all circumstances in the first trimester, allowed abortions that were “reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman” in the second trimester and outlawed in the third except to “preserve the life or health of the pregnant woman.” It wasn’t great! And even that failed, because nearly 60 percent of South Dakotans voted against it.
Meanwhile, South Dakota has the second most severe shortage of obstetrics care (North Dakota being the worst), with 57.6 percent of the state’s counties qualifying as maternity care deserts. They also have the highest infant mortality rate in the Midwest and Plains states and the fifth highest in the country. So … that’s all very nice for them.
The other ballot measures were at least slightly less horrifying than that. Nebraska voted to keep its ban on abortions after the first trimester, which is bad, but still not as bad as outlawing them.
In Florida, 57 percent of voters wanted to overturn their state’s draconian ban that outlaws abortions after six weeks — which sounds really good, except for how they needed to get 60 percent of the vote in order to pass it. Why? Because Florida.
Though I have to say — the 57 percent is a really good sign given how blood red the state is and the fight DeSantis put up to defeat the measure. As recently as yesterday, my dad (who lives in Florida) was getting text messages pushing ridiculous disinformation about ninth month abortions. In that environment, it’s at least some hope.
And hey! Maybe that 57 percent will realize that, if they want to have nice things, like “a state where they have bodily autonomy and don’t have to worry about dying if they miscarry,” they might need a different governor.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
It's just so weird to me that at least in a lot of the country the right to abortion remains something people seem to support, but those same voters somehow also decided to elect the guy that brags about taking it away. I am confused about these people.
We can point fingers all we want but whoever controls the media controls what voters think. It’s that simple.
Harris did everything right. She had an amazing ground game. She out-fundraised the other side. She kick his ass in the debate. She spent lots of time in key battleground states.
The one thing she didn’t have was the media on her side.