A proposed amendment to enshrine access to abortion care in the Nebraska Constitution moved closer to appearing on the ballot in November after a coalition of reproductive rights advocates on Wednesday submitted the required number of valid signatures to state officials.
Protect Our Rights, the group leading the ballot effort, announced it had collected the signatures of more than 207,000 registered voters — more than the approximately 123,000 it needed to submit before a Wednesday deadline to move forward with the process of getting its proposal on the ballot.
The group said it had also fulfilled a requirement under state law that the total includes at least 5% of registered voters in 38 of the state’s 93 counties — which had been viewed as a particularly difficult hurdle for abortion rights groups in the state.
A disproportionate number of Democratic voters in solidly red Nebraska live in just a handful of counties surrounding Omaha and Lincoln; only two of the state’s 93 counties voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.
The Nebraska Secretary of State's office confirmed that the group surpassed the signature requirement. The office has until Aug. 12 to verify the submitted signatures and until Sept. 13 to certify the measure for the November ballot.
The measure proposed by Protect Our Rights — a coalition that includes Planned Parenthood North Central States and the American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska — would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution up until fetal viability, or about the 24th week of pregnancy. The proposal includes exceptions beyond that time for a woman’s life and health.
"As mothers, doctors, families, concerned citizens and people navigating pregnancy, we were united in the belief that patients and providers should have the freedom to make their own health care decisions, not politicians," Ashlei Spivey, a member of Protect Our Rights’ executive committee, said at a news conference Wednesday.
She added: "We believed that people should be treated with compassion and have privacy to decide if and when they have to make the deeply personal decision to have an abortion. We also believe that health care providers should not be criminalized and forced to delay care or put their patients' lives at risk because of extreme restrictions and political interference. We believed and knew that people across the state felt the same."
Currently, abortion is illegal in Nebraska after the 12th week of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and saving the mother’s life.
If voters passed the proposed amendment, it would effectively undo that law.
Nebraska is one of 11 states where organizers are seeking to enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. Measures are officially on the ballot in Maryland, New York, Florida, South Dakota and Colorado. Organizers in Arizona submitted signatures to state officials for their effort earlier Wednesday.
In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, voters in several states — including California, Michigan and Ohio — have approved ballot measures ensuring abortion rights.
Organizers in Nebraska, however, still face some obstacles before November.
Opponents of the ballot measure still have several weeks to challenge signatures. And importantly, a second effort with a competing measure regarding reproductive rights could complicate the path forward for the pro-reproductive rights effort.
That effort, supported by anti-abortion groups including the Nebraska Catholic Conference and Nebraska Right to Life, seeks to put to voters a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban abortion after the first trimester except in situations where the abortion is “necessitated by a medical emergency or when the pregnancy results from sexual assault or incest.”
Anti-abortion groups working to advance that measure said its organizers submitted more than 205,000 signatures, more than the required amount, to state officials Wednesday.
A third, launched by a group of individual anti-abortion activists, seeks to amend the state constitution by adding a personhood clause stating that “a preborn child at every stage of development is a person.” If passed, that would effectively ban all abortion care and would likely affect fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization.
That effort did not submit the required number of signatures ahead of the deadline, the Nebraska Secretary of State's office said.
