(The Center Square) – A judge’s recent decision overturning Arizona’s abortion laws “shows the long-term impact of ballot initiatives,” according to a pro-life attorney.
Last week, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gregory Como stopped numerous Arizona abortion laws, including the state’s reason ban, two-trip requirement law and telemedicine ban.
Como said in his ruling that these laws violated Proposition 139, which is an amendment Arizona voters passed in 2024 that provides a constitutional guarantee for a right to an abortion.
The judge wrote that “virtually every regulation of abortion ‘interferes’ with a woman’s right to seek an abortion.”
“The state’s interest in protecting potential life is not a legitimate justification for a law that interferes with a woman’s right to seek a pre-viability abortion,” Como said.
“Each of these laws infringes on a woman’s ‘autonomous decision making’ by mandating medical procedures and disclosure of information regardless of the patient’s needs and wishes,” he added.
Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told The Center Square this week that the judge said “virtually every regulation of abortion would violate this amendment.”
Glenn Daniel said cases like this show amendments are sweeping and are getting rid of every health and safety law.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes sees it differently. She told The Center Square that the court’s ruling was a “major victory for Arizona women, families, and their doctors.”
“The court has affirmed what we’ve known all along: The abortion restrictions challenged in this case are unconstitutional,” the Democratic official said this week.
Mayes said the judge’s ruling “affirms that Arizona women have a constitutional right to access the reproductive healthcare they need without unnecessary government interference.”
“Doctors must be allowed to provide care based on their medical judgment, not on the beliefs of anti-abortion politicians,” she added.
Now that abortion drugs are able to be legally sent through the mail, Glenn Daniel said the number of abortions occurring in Arizona is likely to go up.
She added that the abortion drugs would be “increasingly likely” to be used as a “tool to harm women.” As an example, she said people could get hold of abortion drugs and use them for criminal activity rather than for personal use.
What is happening in Arizona is what has occurred in other states that have passed constitutional amendments guaranteeing a right to abortion, Glenn Daniel said.
To illustrate, she gave the example of Michigan, which passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to abortion in 2022. She noted after the constitutional amendment passed, state lawmakers went after the regulatory structure surrounding abortion.
Glenn Daniel said it is only a matter of time before the abortion industry goes after Arizona’s other protective laws, such as the law against taxpayer funding of abortion.
To help fight back against these law changes occurring in states that have passed constitutional amendments guaranteeing the right to an abortion, the pro-life movement needs to be “vocal and say, ‘This was not what many people voted for,’ ” she said.
“The long-term vision of the pro-life movement is to help expose how extreme these policies are and show that they’re not popular with voters once they understand what they got, which is not how these initiatives were sold to them,” Glenn Daniel explained.
She added that the pro-life movement needs to do the “hard work of going back and reinstating pro-life protections.”
Glenn Daniel pointed to Missouri, which passed one of these constitutional amendments in 2024 but will have another ballot proposal this year to try to repeal it.
Due to Proposition 139, the abortion situation in Arizona is worse than what it was under the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Glenn Daniel noted.
The Roe decision made abortion legal in all states. The Casey decision upheld Roe v. Wade but permitted states to implement certain restrictions.
“These initiatives were sold as ‘back to Roe,’ and that’s not what voters got,” Glenn Daniel said.
