The right to abortion has emerged as a major issue in the presidential campaign in the United States. Around twenty states have recently banned or severely restricted access to abortion. These positions follow the reversal of jurisprudence by the Supreme Court of the United States which annulled in June 2022 the federal guarantee of the right to abortion.
This decision gave states full latitude to legislate in this area. It is in this context that the Arizona Supreme Court declared on April 9 that the 1864 law banning virtually all abortion was “now applicable”, after decades of dormancy. In this text, neither rape nor incest are considered valid exceptions. This choice sparked intense controversy in the country. Joe Biden condemned it and Donald Trump criticized it but in a more moderate way.
“A stain on our state”
On Wednesday, the upper house of the Arizona Legislature voted 16-14 to repeal it. The law must now be promulgated by Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of this state in the southwest of the United States.
She said she was “happy” with this vote and said “I look forward to enacting this repeal”. “This total ban on abortion would have put doctors in prison, threatened the lives of women across our state, and taken away the right of millions of Arizonans” to dispose of their bodies, she declared.
The Attorney General of Arizona, Democrat Kris Mayes, had long warned that she would not initiate any prosecution – but this position could have changed depending on the elections, the attorneys general being elected in the United States. The decision “to reimpose a law dating from a time when Arizona was not a state, when the Civil War was raging and when women could not even vote, will go down in history as a stain on our state “, she lamented on April 9.
Referendum
The promoters of a popular initiative announced in April that they had collected the necessary signatures to obtain a referendum to include abortion in the Arizona Constitution. This vote should take place at the same time as the presidential election in November, as will for example be the case in Florida (southeast), another decisive state.
Outgoing Democratic President Joe Biden is making the defense of women’s rights a major focus of his campaign for a second term, facing his Republican opponent Donald Trump. The latter prides himself on having, through his appointments to the Supreme Court of the United States, resulted in the cancellation of federal protection for abortion in June 2022, but insists on the electoral risks of an overly conservative position on the question.