CARSON CITY, Nevada (LifeSiteNews) — The Nevada Supreme Court has reversed a lower court ruling against a proposed ballot initiative to embed a “right” to abortion in the Nevada Constitution, concluding its language does not violate the state’s “single-subject rule” and can be placed on the November ballot if supporters’ signatures are ultimately verified.
Backed by a group called “Nevadans for Reproductive Rights,” the so-called “Reproductive Freedom Amendment” would establish a state-level “constitutional right” to “make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including, without limitation, prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, vasectomy, tubal ligation, abortion, abortion care [sic], management of a miscarriage and infertility care.”
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It would allow abortion to be “regulate[d]” after fetal viability, albeit with the exception of any abortion deemed “necessary” for the mother’s “life or physical or mental health,” a loophole that would render any ban effectively meaningless. It would also establish that the state could not “penalize, prosecute or otherwise take adverse action” against individuals for “actual, potential, perceived or alleged outcome of the pregnancy of the individual, including, without limitation, a miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion,” which could be construed as protecting infanticide.
Last fall, the pro-life PAC Coalition for Parents and Children filed a lawsuit against the initiative on the grounds that it violated the legal requirement that potential amendments only cover one subject at a time, by covering a range of topics aside from abortion.
Carson City District Court Judge James Russell agreed in November, calling the amendment “probably the clearest case I have seen that I think there is a violation of the single subject rule.”
On Thursday, however, the Silver State’s highest court ruled otherwise, the Washington Examiner reports. “This initiative petition’s single subject is the creation of a fundamental right to reproductive freedom [sic],” it ruled. “All the petition’s provisions are fundamentally related or germane to that single subject.”
Supporters need to submit 102,362 valid signatures by June 26 to place the amendment before voters; they say they already have more than 160,000. Next, the Nevada Secretary of State’s office must review them for accuracy. If successful, it must win a simple majority vote in November, then a second simple majority vote in Nevada’s next general election.
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
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Since 2022, the abortion lobby has had great success with that last tactic. State constitutional amendments effectively insulate abortion-on-demand from future state legislation and can only be overridden by a federal abortion ban, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box. In the past two years, pro-lifers have either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, and Ohio.
This year, there are a total of three abortion-related ballot initiatives confirmed for the November elections, with as many as 12 more that could make the ballots as well.