Organizers for a ballot initiative that would amend the Arizona Constitution to protect abortion rights set up outside the Arizona Capitol on April 9, 2024, shortly after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that an 1864 near-total abortion ban is enforceable. Photo by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy | Arizona Mirror
An anti-abortion group is backtracking on a lawsuit it launched against the Arizona Abortion Access Act, withdrawing allegations that signature collectors for the campaign turned in legally insufficient forms or fraudulently misrepresented the ballot initiative.
Last week, Arizona Right to Life filed a lawsuit in Maricopa County Superior Court calling for the abortion rights initiative to be blocked from the November ballot. The nonprofit was one of several groups that earlier this year unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Arizonans not to support the initiative’s signature gathering effort. That strategy proved unsuccessful; the campaign behind the act turned in more than 820,000 signatures — a record-breaking total that exceeds the 383,923 required for voters to consider it in the fall.
If voters choose to support the Arizona Abortion Access Act, the state’s current 15-week gestational ban would be nullified and abortion would be enshrined as a fundamental right in the Arizona Constitution. The constitutional amendment guarantees access to the procedure up to the point of fetal viability, widely regarded to be around 24 weeks. It also includes exceptions beyond that timeframe if a health care provider deems an abortion necessary to preserve a patient’s life, physical or mental health.
Arizona Right to Life’s lawsuit represented a change of tack. If the organization could convince a court that signatures were obtained fraudulently, or invalidate enough petition circulators, then it could be barred from the ballot. To that end, Arizona Right to Life argued in its original complaint that as many as 200 signature gatherers either mischaracterized the act to Arizonans, collected signatures despite not being eligible to do so or submitted documentation with incorrect contact information.
The campaign behind the abortion rights initiative has previously stated as many as 7,000 volunteers helped collect signatures, along with a number of paid circulators.
On Tuesday, Arizona Right to Life withdrew the part of its lawsuit revolving around petition circulators, saying that the number of potentially invalidated signatures would be insufficient to disqualify the initiative in the end. After reviewing marked up petition sheets released by the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office a day after the Arizona Right to Life filed its lawsuit, the group decided the allegations against petition circulators should be dismissed, wrote attorney Jennifer Wright.
“Plaintiff determined that maintaining the circulator challenge as articulated…was not likely to prevent certification of the initiative,” she wrote. “Accordingly, although there is no legal requirement that a circulator challenge be outcome determinative, in the interests of justice and to conserve judicial resources, Plaintiff has voluntarily decided to withdraw (the claim) in its entirety.”
Backers of the abortion rights ballot measure derided the group’s decision to drop one of its key arguments. Cheryl Bruce, campaign manager of Arizona for Abortion Access pointing to the backtracking as proof that the entire lawsuit is “desperate and frivolous.”
“This demonstrates, yet again, that our opposition is willing to do and say anything — be it in court or to voters — in their attempt to rob Arizonans of our rights,” she said in an emailed statement. “In contrast, Arizona for Abortion Access continues to fight to give voters a voice this November. Today, we moved another step closer to ensuring voters will have the chance to restore and protect the right to access abortion care, once and for all.”
Bruce said the campaign will ask the court to award it legal fees to compensate for preparing a defense against the lawsuit, and added that she’s confident the court will reject the anti-abortion group’s remaining arguments.
The bulk of Arizona Right to Life’s complaint centers around the claim that the act is simply too confusing for everyday Arizonans to understand. According to the lawsuit, because of the initiative’s unclear language and intent, voters who ordinarily wouldn’t have signed petition sheets were tricked into doing so. The courts have the power to block ballot measures considered to be misleading.
Among other arguments, attorneys for Arizona Right to Life allege that the act’s mental health exception is too vague and broad, and that the act fraudulently characterizes itself as restoring the fetal viability deadline in Roe v. Wade while at the same time upholding an overly lenient exception for abortions performed beyond that point. Many of the anti-abortion group’s arguments echo near-identical ones advanced by the It Goes Too Far Campaign, which seeks to frame the abortion rights initiative as too extreme for Arizona.