On the hot afternoon of June 24, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Nikole Walker, at 50, felt she no longer wanted to be silent or ashamed. That she didn’t have to continue hiding from the sexual abuse she suffered when she was 10 years old and the abortion she suffered when she was 11 years old. “Only a few close friends and my husband knew the whole story. Even my children didn’t know about abortion. But that day I told him and it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders,” Walker says. Two years later, she continues to explain her story to defend the right to abortion in the United States, particularly on Proposition 139 which will be voted on November 5 in Arizona.
This key state will vote in the presidential election on whether to include an amendment to the state constitution to protect the right to abortion. Nine other states will also hold referendums on November 5 to decide whether to do the same: Montana, Missouri, Nebraska, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Nevada, New York and South Dakota. In total, 13 states have already made access to abortion illegal and 12, including Arizona, are described as “hostile” by the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Abortion has become one of the central themes of the campaign and has posed some problems in recent months for Donald Trump. The Republican maintains a fragile balance in its positioning. On the one hand, he boasts of having appointed three of the six conservative judges who repealed Eggs and On the other hand, he says he will not ban abortion at the federal level if he wins the election.
“From the minute he fell deer I felt so angry and so sure it was wrong that I no longer felt that shame. And since then, people have been using the word “abortion” in ways they’ve never seen before. Paradoxically, banning abortion took away the stigma,” Walker says at her home in Flagstaff, two hours from Phoenix. “The next thing I thought of was my daughter, who was 17 at the time. As a precaution, I bought Mifepristone [medicamento para abortos farmacológicos] because I didn’t know what might happen after that.
A year and 10 months after Walker feared the worst, the Arizona Supreme Court put on the table the possibility of salvaging an 1864 law that banned abortion in almost all cases. Although this project ultimately did not come to fruition, it represented “a complete change in the way many people viewed abortion.” Instead, members of Congress passed a law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
The result was that 577,971 signatures were submitted in August, more than the 50 percent needed for the proposed constitutional amendment to appear on Arizona’s ballots in November. This is the largest number of signatures certified for a ballot measure in state history.
“We all shared not only our stories of abortion, but also our stories of rape, abuse and mistreatment. And women are starting to realize that they shouldn’t be blamed. I don’t applaud the fact that it was revoked. deerbut there has been a big paradigm shift with all these questions. We saw how telling our stories empowers us in a context where you feel like your autonomy over your own body is being taken away from you,” reflects Walker.
Currently, in Arizona, one can only have an abortion up to week 15. “Tests to see if the fetus has any malformations or problems are done between weeks 15 and 20. This shows how the ban on abortion Arizona is restrictive. This forces people who need medical care to leave the state or continue their pregnancy knowing that the baby will die within hours of birth,” Walker says.
In the final part of the campaign to gain the necessary support, Hannah and Erika are going door to door to remind people of the importance of voting for Proposition 139. “I decided to start with door to door a little before the 2020 elections because I was already frustrated by the four years of Trump and I needed to feel like I was doing something to change things,” explains Erika before knocking on the door of one of the 51 houses he visited. day. “We knew the repeal of Roe could happen, so we already had a plan for when that would happen,” Hannah adds.
The defense of reproductive rights was Harris’ main focus during the campaign. As soon as she became the Democrats’ new nominee following Joe Biden’s resignation, Harris promised to sign federal abortion protection. This is why, in Arizona, some interpret that the referendum could favor it. Even if the latest polls don’t say the same thing.
Trump continues to lead Harris by two percentage points in Arizona, according to poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight. Instead, the latest Sienna College poll shows 58% of likely voters in the swing state say they will vote in favor of Proposition 139.
In one of the houses we approach, a middle-aged woman serves us. She’s a Republican and doesn’t want to know anything about the Democratic candidates in Arizona, but when Erika tells her about Proposition 139, her attitude changes: “Yes, I’ll vote for it.”
