Arizona abortion activists say they’ve got enough signatures to force 2024 vote

Democrats and reproductive rights activists alike received their second piece of good news this week with the announcement in Arizona that campaigners there have reached the signature threshold to put an abortion rights amendment on the ballot this year.

NBC News first reported the announcement on Tuesday; activists with the umbrella organisation Arizona for Abortion Access (which includes some local groups as well as offshoots of the ACLU and Planned Parenthood) told the network that it had surged past the signature requirement for ballot access and would continue to push their total higher before the deadline.

Assuming that the group still has enough signatures after some are inevitably invalidated by state law and procedure, the campaign will succeed in putting forth a question on the state’s 2024 ballot asking voters whether the Arizona constitution should include an amendment “establish[ing] a fundamental right to abortion”. If passed, the amendment would prevent any laws or regulations prohibiting abortion procedures before a fetus is medically capable of surviving on its own; it would also protect the right of patients to have abortion procedures at any point if their lives are endangered by the continuation of their pregnancies.

Right now, Arizona bans abortion after 15 weeks into the pregnancy. That law, passed in 2022 and signed by Republican governor Doug Ducey, would be invalidated by the constitutional amendment; fetal viability is generally considered to occur around 24 weeks into the pregnancy.

Cheryl Bruce, a spokesperson for the ballot measure campaign, told NBC News that reproductive freedom was “an issue that people are eager to see on the ballot” after the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning