Montana Abortion Rights Groups Submit Signatures for a Ballot Measure

A coalition of abortion rights groups in Montana announced Friday that it had submitted enough signatures to put a measure on the November ballot that would ask voters to affirm a right to reproductive freedom in the State Constitution.

Montana would join four other states — Colorado, South Dakota, Florida and New York — with similar ballot measures this fall. The signatures must be certified by county clerks, who send them to the secretary of state, who has until Aug. 22 to set the ballot questions. Organizers said they submitted more than 117,000 signatures, well clear of the 60,039 required.

Abortion is legal in Montana until viability, or roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy, because its highest court ruled in 1999 that the state Constitution’s provisions on privacy protect a right to abortion.

Leaders of the coalition, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, say the explicit constitutional right to abortion will prevent the Republican-controlled Legislature or future courts from undoing the 1999 ruling.

Abortion rights groups in six other states are collecting signatures for citizen-sponsored ballot measures for November. Those include presidential battleground states like Arizona, where Democrats hope that strong support for abortion rights can lift the fortunes of President Biden.

Montana reliably votes Republican in presidential contests, but Democrats hope that turnout for the ballot measure could help Senator Jon Tester in a tough fight for re-election.

Polls have found that — as in all but a handful of states — a majority of Montana residents want abortion to be legal in all or most cases.

Anti-abortion groups and Republican state officials have tried to block the citizen-sponsored ballot measure. The coalition that turned in signatures Friday was tied up in a court fight for months after the state’s attorney general tried to strike the proposed language for the ballot measure as “legally insufficient.” The state’s Supreme Court ruled that he had exceeded his authority.

The Montana Family Foundation says the amendment would allow “unlimited abortions,” protect sex traffickers who force women to get abortions, remove parental consent laws on abortion and allow “radical, irreversible gender reassignment surgery.”

Abortion opponents unsuccessfully made those same arguments against ballot measures in Ohio in 2023 and Michigan in 2022. Those measures succeeded by comfortable margins, with polls showing that voters crossed party lines to support abortion rights.

The Montana amendment is similar to the ones in Michigan and Ohio. It would establish an express right “to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy,” including abortion.

It would prohibit the government from “denying or burdening the right to abortion before fetal viability.” After viability, the state could not deny or burden access to abortion if the treating health care professional determines it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s “life or health.”

Seven states have had ballot measures on abortion in the two years since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending federal protection for abortion access. Abortion rights groups have prevailed in all.

Montana is one of those states — it had a ballot measure in 2022 that would have required doctors to provide medical care after premature births and abortions where the fetus was “born alive.” Opponents of the measure argued that the law already requires doctors to provide lifesaving care, and that the measure was intended to stoke fears about abortions late in pregnancy.

Voters rejected it by a six-point margin.