Photo by Jose Luis Magana / AP

Donald Trump's views on abortion are notoriously fluid, but he holds two more or less consistent positions. One is that his Democratic opponents support the right to “execute” young children. (They don't.) The other thing is that abortion is a states' rights issue, as stated in the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. “For fifty-two years they’ve been trying to bring Roe v. Wade to the states,” Trump claimed in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. “And thanks to the genius, heart and strength of six Supreme Court justices, we were able to achieve this.” He further clarified who he meant by “they”: “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, every liberal, everyone Conservatives – they all wanted this issue brought back to the states where people could vote, and that's exactly what happened.”

Since Dobbs' removal, seven states have voted on ballot initiatives on abortion, and the pro-choice side has won each time. “Well, Ohio? “The vote was reasonably liberal,” Trump said in the debate. “Kansas? The vote was reasonably liberal. Much more liberal than people would have thought.” Still, Trump has, at least on the surface, believed in the democratic process for deciding the abortion law. When the former president was asked in August whether he would direct the FDA , “to revoke access to mifepristone” – one of the two drugs used in medical abortion – he seemed to stumble over the terminology, but quickly settled on the will of the people: “You could do things that are absolutely complementary would, would, would, and these things are pretty open and human. But you have to be able to vote, and all I want to do is give everyone a vote, and the votes are happening right now as we speak.”

Trump has a clear political incentive to reframe the end of a constitutional right as a mere prologue to the triumph of direct democracy. The overthrow of Roe and its catastrophic consequences were a major driver of Democratic turnout in the 2022 midterm elections. In 2024, reproductive freedom is Harris' top concern and has allowed her to dramatically reduce Trump's numbers, particularly among white women.

Today, voters in 10 more states will decide on constitutional amendments codifying the right to abortion. These include three states – Florida, Missouri and South Dakota – with full or near-total abortion bans; a fourth, Nebraska, which bans most abortions after the first trimester; and a fifth, Arizona, which is subject to a fifteen-week suspension. Most pro-choice ballot measures receive majority support in polls. (A simple majority is required to pass referendums, except for Colorado, where the threshold is 55 percent, and Florida, where it is 60 percent.)

In some states where citizens have initiated ballot measures on abortion rights, elected officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to thwart their efforts. In Arkansas, which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the country and one of the most draconian abortion bans, volunteers collected more than a hundred thousand signatures in support of an amendment, but the Republican secretary of state blocked it on the final vote, citing a paperwork error. In Florida, people who submitted signatures in support of the state's ballot measure received visits from state police investigating false claims of fraud, and local television stations were threatened with prosecution for airing an ad supporting the change. And in Missouri, Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft first tried to plant inflammatory language in proposed Amendment 3—claiming that it would allow “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions from conception to live birth”—and then unilaterally withdraw its authorization It. (The state Supreme Court overruled Ashcroft on both counts.)

Missouri has also been the site of an aggressive disinformation campaign, using billboards and local radio to link the proposed change to nine-month abortions and “children's gender surgery.” The political action committee behind at least some of the billboards, Vote No on 3, recently received a last-minute donation of millions from an advocacy group affiliated with Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society. The zeal and deep resources of the opposition suggest that the abortion wars will be far from over, even if reproductive rights prevail on the ballot in Missouri and elsewhere.