With this vote, Ohio becomes the fourth state since 2022 to pass a constitutional measure to safeguard abortion rights, and the seventh to use the referendum process to protect those rights in some way. The results are the latest evidence that bypassing state legislatures that are tilted against abortion rights with direct-to-the-people referendums is a winning strategy for preserving or enhancing reproductive freedom. But they also indicate that these state-by-state battles are wearying, expensive, and perhaps unsustainable. The history of these fights dating back to the 1960s highlights this duality: state-by-state campaigns can be inspiring and successful, but they’re also an endless game of whack-a-mole for advocates of reproductive rights—one that might not be winnable in the end.
In the late 1960s and into 1970, reproductive rights activists made substantial progress at the state level. They took advantage of shifting public opinion that went from majority opposition to legal abortion access to majority support.
State legislatures were slow to change policy in line with this shift. So feminists and their allies used every strategy and resource available to them, from mass organizing and demonstrations, to legislative lobbying and pressuring elected officials in their home districts, to encouraging medical, public health, and legal leaders to change the policies of their professional bodies to reflect the safety of legal abortion and the risks to pregnant women when the procedure was criminalized. They won reforms that expanded access to abortion in 13 states and made it mostly accessible in an additional four states.
New York State was the location of the biggest and most high-profile win. In July 1970, the state began to implement a transformative abortion law, which granted New Yorkers and anyone who could get to New York access to safe, legal, and somewhat affordable abortion care through the 24th week of a pregnancy. The win reflected the rising power of a coalition that joined activists for women’s rights with “Reform” Democrats like the Black Assemblyman Percy Sutton from Harlem, and Austrian Jewish refugee Assemblyman Franz Leichter, who worked together to pull the Democratic Party to the pro-civil rights left.
But things grew far more challenging for the movement after the victory in New York. Although public opinion kept moving in the direction of more liberal abortion laws, conservative lobbyists for the Catholic Church and other abortion opponents counter-mobilized aggressively and it became difficult to keep up. The momentum toward changing state policies halted, and the democratic process that had seemed to be working so well essentially stopped working. In addition to the New York victory, 1970 also saw Alaska and Hawaii loosen their abortion laws through legislative action, and activists in Washington state won a major reform via a hard-fought popular referendum campaign. But no other states moved forward over the next three years.