Anti-abortion advocates are touting their victory in keeping Idaho’s strict abortion prohibition in place after losing ground in three other states amid the seismic Democratic Party victories nationwide in the midterm elections.
Idahoans voted by a comfortable 12 percentage points to keep a near-total abortion prohibition on elective abortion on Tuesday. But the anti-abortion side failed resoundingly in referenda in Virginia, Missouri, and Nevada.
Voters in Nevada and Virginia, by large margins, enshrined a fundamental right to abortion into their respective state constitutions. Meanwhile, voters in Missouri rejected a ballot measure that would have repealed the Show Me State’s abortion rights amendment passed in 2024.
Lila Rose, president of the anti-abortion group Live Action, called the defeats for the movement in the three states “devastating setbacks for innocent children who deserve the protection of the law” but praised the passage of the Idaho ballot initiative keeping the anti-abortion law in place.
“Against a well-funded campaign to expand abortion, Idahoans stood firm and refused to abandon their state’s legal protections for preborn children,” Rose said in a press statement. “Their victory is proof that the abortion industry’s agenda can be defeated at the ballot box.”
Idaho’s anti-abortion statute is one of the strictest in the nation, prohibiting elective abortions at all stages of pregnancy, with the only exception being to prevent the death of the mother.
The amendment would have legalized abortion through fetal viability, or the point at which a fetus can survive independently without extraordinary medical intervention, but anti-abortion advocates argued it would have allowed for later-in-pregnancy abortions under the guise of any problem that “complicates the physical medical condition” of the pregnant mother.
Kesley Pritchard, a spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Washington Examiner the result in Idaho was “a really sound rejection of a deceptive ballot initiative” but said the Missouri amendment “was a disappointing loss.”
The ballot initiative in Missouri, an otherwise conservative Republican stronghold, received endorsements from Gov. Mike Kehoe (R-MO) and his wife, Claudia Kehoe, who ran the campaign organization in support of repealing the state’s abortion rights amendment. The anti-abortion initiative also earned support from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO).
The loss in Missouri is a setback to anti-abortion activists, some of whom argued that compromise abortion restrictions can win direct votes if they have support from strong statewide figures. That line of argument emerged after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) helped defeat a ballot measure to deregulate abortion in Florida in 2024.
Anti-abortion leaders at the national level did not have much confidence in defeating either the Nevada or Virginia attempts to enshrine abortion through the third trimester, but they projected optimism regarding both the Missouri and Idaho initiatives heading into Election Day.
Pritchard said the overwhelming turnout for Democrats in the election affected the anti-abortion amendment’s chances in Missouri.
“It was a really challenging national political climate, and I think that had a lot to do with what happened with the vote there,” Pritchard said.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, called the results nationwide “a disaster for the unborn” in a strategy memo disseminated late on election night and blamed Republican strategists for encouraging candidates up and down the ticket to minimize abortion as an issue.
“The only tangible results of this strategy were turnout problems, missed persuasion opportunities, and hundreds of thousands of dead babies in the strongest prolife states,” Dannenfelser wrote.
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Kristan Hawkins, a native Idahoan and president of the hard-line group Students for Life, said Wednesday on X that Democrats win in large numbers “when Republicans refuse to lead, refuse to talk about abortion.”
“Weak GOP leadership loses elections every single time, and when you put your head in the sand on the issue of abortion as a Republican, you will always lose,” Hawkins said. “The Republican Party needs to wake up right now. Being slightly less pro-abortion than Democrats is not a winning strategy.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
