How a rightwing machine stopped Arkansas's ballot to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans

[LiberalArkie]

Tue 29 Oct 2024 09.00 EDT

A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise reveals a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure the measure was quashed before it ever reached voters

Theresa Lee was 22 weeks pregnant last year when her doctor confirmed the news: she had no amniotic fluid and the baby she was expecting, who she had named Cielle, was not growing.

In many states across the US, Lee would have been advised that terminating the doomed pregnancy was an option, and possibly the safest course to protect her own life.

But in the state of Arkansas, Lee was told she had just one choice: wait it out.

A doctor who had confirmed the diagnosis was apologetic but insistent: the state’s laws meant he could be fined or jailed if he performed an abortion. In the wake of the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Arkansas activated a so-called trigger law that made all abortion illegal except if a woman was in an acute medical emergency and facing death. There are no other exceptions: not for rape victims, minors or fatal fetal

Snip

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/29/arkansas-abortion-ban-ballot

[TomSlick]

1. The Arkansas "nonpartisan" Supreme Court went out of its way to kill the initiative.

The result was entirely predictable. The Arkansas GOP hates all initiatives but really hates woman controlling their own bodies. The Supreme Court simply carried the GOP's water.

[RazorbackExpat]

2. Arkansas is reverting back to its "Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant" days

*sigh*

[TomSlick]

3. Yep.

As Herself says, "No one ever moved to Arkansas to have their consciousness raised."

[RazorbackExpat]

4. My grandparents moved to Arkansas because it was warmer and cheaper there

They moved to the NW because it wasn't as backward as the rest of the state was back then (1950). They were Republicans because my grandmother was an American-born German who was pissed off because Woodrow Wilson had made the teaching of her first language illegal during WWI and she had to subsequently change her first name because of it. My grandfather was a Republican because he was a gung-ho VFW type and was from a town near D. D. Eisenhower's adopted hometown of Abilene, Kansas. Also, Republicans in NW Arkansas, at least, were far more progressive back then than they are now. My late mom once told me that her parents would not have supported what the GOP has become.