LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (LifeSiteNews) — A proposed amendment adding a “right” to abortion to the Arkansas Constitution will not appear on the November ballot, thanks to the Arkansas Supreme Court agreeing that its backers failed to properly file the necessary documentation with their petition signatures.
Abortion is currently illegal in Arkansas for any reason except allegedly to save a mother’s life from physical danger. But under the Arkansas Abortion Amendment of 2024, the state could not “prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion services within 18 weeks of fertilization” (4 1/2 months) for elective abortions or at any point in cases of rape, incest, “fatal fetal anomaly,” or when “needed to protect a pregnant female’s life or to protect a pregnant female from a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury,” according to a “physician’s good-faith medical judgment.” Any state law conflicting with this would be “expressly declared null and void.”
Direct abortion is always gravely immoral and never needed nor ethically justified to save a mother’s life.
The state constitution’s current Amendment 68, which declares that the “policy of Arkansas is to protect the life of every unborn child from conception until birth, to the extent permitted by the Federal Constitution,” would also have been modified to add “and the Constitution of the State of Arkansas” at the end, reinforcing the new limits on pro-life protections.
Back in January, Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin certified the final draft of the amendment after rejecting two previous versions for ambiguous and potentially misleading language, allowing the pro-abortion coalition “Arkansans for Limited Government” (ALG) to move on to signature gathering.
In July, however, Republican Secretary of State John Thurston announced that the group was 3,322 signatures short of the required 90,704, notifying them that it failed to identify the names of the paid canvassers it relied on to collect the signatures and to clarify that canvassers were given proper information regarding the requirements needed to obtain those signatures.
ALG vowed to fight the ruling, but on Thursday, the state’s highest court dashed its hopes, the Associated Press reports.
“We find that the Secretary correctly refused to count the signatures collected by paid canvassers because the sponsor failed to file the paid canvasser training certification,” Justice Rhonda Wood wrote for the 4-3 majority opinion. Writing in dissent, Justice Karen Baker (who is running against Wood for chief justice) accused the majority of “chang[ing] the law in order to deprive the voters of the opportunity to vote on this issue, which is not the proper role of this court.”
“Proud I helped build the first conservative Supreme Court majority in the history of Arkansas and today that court upheld the rule of law, and with it, the right to life,” said the state’s Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“This is a win for the rule of law in Arkansas and for those who have followed the rules for years to participate in the state’s ballot initiative process,” Griffin added.
The ruling means Arkansas is one state whose pro-life protections will not be invalidated and made almost impossible to restore anytime soon. The abortion lobby has had great success using false claims that pro-life laws are dangerous to stoke fear about the issue among the general public, most visibly in the area of state constitutional amendments establishing “rights” to abortion immune from future legislation. Pro-lifers have either failed to enact pro-life amendments or stop pro-abortion ones in California, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, and Ohio, prompting much conversation among pro-lifers about the need to develop new strategies to protect life at the ballot box.
This year, there are a total of 11 abortion-related ballot initiatives slated for the November elections.