Andrew DeMillo/AP Photo
A demonstrator holds a sign outside the Arkansas Capitol in Little Rock, June 24, 2022, protesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Wednesday marked the beginning of a campaign for what promises to be one of the country’s most hard-fought abortion rights battles. Arkansas’s Republican attorney general, Tim Griffin, has certified a citizen-initiated constitutional amendment on abortion that could appear on the November ballot. His decision gives the organizers, Arkansans for Limited Government, the go-ahead to begin collecting necessary signatures to move the Arkansas Abortion Amendment of 2024 forward. To get there, they must collect 90,704 signatures from registered voters by July 5.
If the voters enact it, the measure would supplant current Arkansas law, under which abortion is illegal in all cases except to save the life of the pregnant woman. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. Last spring, the Arkansas House rejected proposals to allow abortions in the case of incest and to broaden definitions of what constitutes a medical emergency.
The constitutional amendment proposes to allow abortions up to 18 weeks, and in instances of rape, incest, and fatal fetal anomalies. It would also grant exceptions to protect the life of pregnant individuals and when “in a physician’s good-faith medical judgment abortion services are needed to protect a pregnant female’s life or to protect a pregnant female, from a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury” if an abortion is not performed. It includes definitions of specific bodily functions as well as the term “fertilization.” The amendment would put up certain guardrails, so that “the government of the State of Arkansas, its officers, or its political subdivisions shall not prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion services” within the timelines established by the amendment, presumably to prohibit state lawmakers from devising work-arounds to establish abortion constraints.
Unlike Frank LaRose, the Ohio Republican secretary of state, who dove headfirst into that state’s November 2023 constitutional amendment campaign, Arkansas’s Griffin largely avoided the partisan battle tactics in the public square. “I am and have always been strongly pro-life, but the law does not allow me to consider my own personal views,” Griffin said in a post-certification statement. “I am guided by the law and the law alone. I routinely certify proposals I personally oppose. Conversely, I routinely reject proposals I personally support.”
On its surface, that dispassionate statement is a net positive in a poisonous political climate, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the incredibly tough terrain that the organizers have to navigate in the months ahead. Few states are more rural, Republican, and religious than Arkansas, where evangelical Protestants dominate the state’s religious congregations. The state’s political and cultural landscape is strewn with boulders that will be tough for abortion rights supporters to roll off the road to November.
That rocky road begins at the State Capitol in Little Rock. Early last year, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served President Trump as his second press secretary, signed a bill that directed the Arkansas secretary of state to create a monument to the unborn on State Capitol grounds. It sailed through on exclusively Republican support in a legislature where the GOP has a supermajority. Nine designs were submitted for review by a state commission, among them “a marble sarcophagus carved with wombs,” a pedestal with a “blindfolded fetus balanced on an umbilical cord pedestal,” and a monument displaying facts about children in foster care.
But in a recent NPR interview, one commission member professed to be “dumbfounded” about siting the privately funded project on the Capitol building’s grounds, while a Republican state lawmaker declared himself a Christian who considered it “spiking the football.” At the end of December, the commission finally settled on what they considered to be the most “tasteful” option: a wall of plantings with biblical quotes and excerpts from the state constitution.
Charting a middle ground between laypeople’s religious and cultural beliefs and specific policy proposals is no easy task in a state like Arkansas. Many regular churchgoers are sure to hear their ministers preach against abortion, so they may not sign petitions or vote for the amendment if it appears on the ballot. Yet anti-abortion voters who are appalled by the stories of trauma endured by women with pregnancy complications may well be sympathetic to a less draconian law, while opposing what they consider to be more relaxed regulations that would be embraced in other states.
Charting a middle ground between laypeople’s religious and cultural beliefs and specific policy proposals is no easy task in a state like Arkansas.
In short, the campaign’s advocates need to convince voters that the measure does not fundamentally betray their pro-life views if they’re going to persuade them to support (or just not actively oppose) the amendment. What may seem like a very modest proposal for voters outside Arkansas may be “progress” in a place that currently has an absolute ban in place.
Occasionally, this overturning of belief by reality has even been on view in the legislature, where a tiny minority of conservative Republicans have opposed some anti-abortion legislation proposals. During the 2019 debate on the state’s trigger ban, Dan Douglas, a Republican state representative, delivered an impassioned personal story about his niece. Her fetus lacked a key vital organ and others would never function properly. She could bear the child, who would suffer for days and then die soon thereafter. “Who are we to sit in judgment of these women making a decision between them and their physician and their God above?” Douglas said at the time. He ended up voting against the trigger ban because it did not provide for exceptions for fatal fetal anomalies, rape, and incest.
Arkansans for Limited Government, the group leading the amendment campaign, is a coalition that includes individual reproductive rights supporters, health care professionals, and faith leaders as well as organizations like For AR People, a progressive advocacy group focused on state government transparency and accountability. Amendment organizers want to appeal to Arkansans who are interested in what they consider to be palatable abortion restrictions, but very specific limits nonetheless. Gennie Diaz, who heads up For AR People, told Slate, “It’s threading the needle with Arkansas voters on what they view as limited government.” So far, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU of Arkansas have not been involved in the campaign.
Writing medical procedures like abortion into law invariably leads to confusion and controversy for women experiencing pregnancy complications as well as their doctors and hospitals, as recent cases involving women in Texas, Kentucky, and Ohio demonstrate. The question of viability has raised questions about enshrining such specific markers in the state constitution.
A September 2022 Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College poll found that 51 percent of likely Arkansas voters said that current law should change, while 43 percent supported the existing parameters; another 7 percent did not know. A second question, however, that asked whether current abortion law should be changed to make it “easier” or “harder” to get an abortion got a very different response: 92 percent of respondents indicated “easier.”
Arkansas's Republican state lawmakers are not fans of ballot measures and have already interfered with the ballot initiative process. Signature gatherers must also be citizens and residents of the state, undergo training, and be licensed. They cannot be paid per signature and must adhere to a long list of regulations in order to obtain verifiable signatures. There are nearly three dozen reasons that a signature or an entire of page of signatures could be invalidated.
Once licensed, canvassers must collect signatures in 50 of the state’s 75 counties, up from only 15, a move state lawmakers implemented last spring. Republicans say they designed the change to make it harder for out-of-state groups and wealthy individuals to influence ballot campaigns. However, the change also dilutes the influence of Little Rock, Fayetteville, and Fort Smith, the state’s three major metro areas, while raising the stakes for signature-gathering efforts in the rural counties where more than 40 percent of the state’s residents live.
Not so coincidentally, state lawmakers took aim at this display of direct democracy only after voters overwhelmingly rejected a legislatively initiated plan to require a supermajority of voters to pass ballot measures in 2022 and increase the number of counties canvassed in 2020.
