Reproductive rights activists in Nevada said Monday that they’ve collected enough signatures to put an amendment on the November ballot to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.
Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, the group behind the effort, said it submitted more than 200,000 signatures, from all 17 of the state’s counties, in support of the potential ballot measure to the Nevada secretary of state’s office, which will now work on validating them. If approved, voters will have the chance to say the state’s constitution explicitly protects abortion, largely safeguarding reproductive care from legislative attacks.
The submitted signatures amount to nearly double the 102,362 required to proceed with the ballot qualification process. The submission comes more than a month before the June 26 collection deadline.
“The number of signatures gathered in just over three months shows how deeply Nevadans believe in abortion rights and its importance to this moment in our nation’s history,” Lindsey Harmon, president of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, said at a news conference announcing the achievement.
Under a law voters passed in 1990, the swing state currently allows abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, which is around the point of fetal viability outside the womb. But ensuring abortion access in Nevada is more vital than ever, Harmon said, given how lawmakers in neighboring states have put stricter limits on the procedure.
“Nevada is now surrounded by states with abortion bans,” she said of the situation since the fall of Roe v. Wade. “We know these attacks will continue.”
Constitutional amendments are the best bet to protect abortion rights from future attacks, a doctor who spoke at Monday’s news conference said.
“We know that 30-year protections aren’t enough in a post-Roe world, which is why we’re ensuring that our freedoms are constitutionally protected,” said Dr. Harpreet Tsui, an internal medicine physician.
“We can’t leave our reproductive freedom up to any political whims,” she added.
Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom has been working to put the amendment on the ballot since last summer, following the leads of California, Michigan, Ohio and Vermont ― all states where voters have elected to enshrine abortion access in their constitutions following the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022. In Kansas and Kentucky, two deep-red states, voters have rejected recent efforts to say their constitutions don’t protect the right to an abortion.
if approved, the ballot initiative stands a good chance of passing in Nevada, where nearly 7 in 10 voters described themselves as pro-choice in a 2021 poll.
Nationally, support for abortion access remains high ― despite GOP efforts to villainize it. Polling released last week from Pew Research found that 63% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, increasing by 4 percentage points since 2021. That view is even shared by two-thirds of moderate and liberal Republicans, the survey found.
