Nebraska voters keep state’s abortion restrictions
‘Women are being harmed by the ban that we have, and that’s going to obviously continue to happen,’ said the campaign manager for a failed measure to protect abortion.
A majority of Nebraska voters chose on Nov. 5 to enshrine in the state constitution the 12-week abortion ban that has been in place since 2023.
The ballot in Nebraska contained two competing abortion ballot measures, the one that will amend the constitution with the 12-week ban, and another that would have allowed abortion up to the point of fetal viability, generally around 24 weeks’ gestation. The former was approved by a slim majority of voters.
Initiative 434, the Protect Women and Children measure, limits abortion after the first trimester and was approved by 496,586 votes. Initiative 439, the Protect the Right to Abortion measure, received 401,071 votes. That measure would have provided exceptions for abortions in cases of rape, incest, medical emergencies, and the life of the pregnant patient along with legal abortion in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
“Even going into election night, we knew it was going to be tough just because of the opposition and all the money and political interference that was poured into confusing voters,” Allie Berry, the campaign manager for Protect Our Rights, the coalition that promoted Initiative 439, told the Nebraska Independent. “We knew if it was just us on the ballot, just our initiative, I do believe we would have passed.
Reproductive rights advocates who supported Initiative 439 accused those who backed the opposing measure of causing voter confusion.
“We only fell short because of a flood of well-funded misinformation and a dueling initiative designed to confuse voters, a campaign that outright lied to voters by claiming it would get the government out of health care decisions,” Mindy Rush Chipman, the executive director of the ACLU of Nebraska, said in a statement.
Even though the measure to protect reproductive rights failed, Berry said the fact that a lot of people turned out to support abortion rights was a positive thing.
“I think it was a fight we needed to have to move this whole movement forward,” she said, adding that her concerns about the future of abortion access in the state remain the same. “Women are being harmed by the ban that we have, and that’s going to obviously continue to happen because we weren’t able to get this passed and to overturn that law that is now in the constitution.”
Andi Curry Grubb, the executive director of Planned Parenthood of Nebraska, told the Nebraska Examiner that the outcome of the election is “a direct result of the fearmongering and disinformation spread by anti-choice activists and candidates.”
Nebraska was one of 10 states with abortion-related measures on the ballot on Nov. 5.
Voters in Arizona, Missouri, Montana, Colorado, New York, and Maryland passed measures amending their state constitutions to protect abortion access. Voters in Florida and South Dakota voted against constitutional protections for abortion.
