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In a victory for abortion rights advocates, New Yorkers just voted to enshrine extensive anti-discrimination protections into their state constitution—permanently insulating the rights of pregnant people, abortion seekers, and the LGBTQ community, among others, from changing political winds.
Proposal 1 is one of 10 ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights that went before voters on Tuesday. Going into Election Day, supporters of abortion rights had won every single ballot initiative to go before voters since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
With 33 percent of votes counted as of 9:50 p.m., Proposal 1 was winning with 72 percent of the vote Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press. But the ballot measure encountered and overcame steeper-than-expected opposition in the safe blue state. Opponents had mounted an openly transphobic campaign to block it, spreading misleading claims about the proposal’s effects on a range of Republican culture war issues, including trans youth health care, women’s sports, and noncitizen voting. In the final days of the race, conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein dropped $6.5 million into efforts to defeat the measure.
From the outset, Proposal 1 was designed to protect abortion rights. As Mother Jones reported last week:
New York’s Proposal 1 may not include the word “abortion,” but it would create first-in-the-nation protections for the rights of pregnant people.
The proposal is a broad version of the Equal Rights Amendment, the long-running feminist effort to guarantee women’s rights in state and federal constitutions. Right now, New York’s constitution only forbids government discrimination on the basis of race and religion. Prop. 1 adds more protected categories to that list: disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Those types of discrimination are already banned under state law, but by enshrining protections in the constitution, Prop. 1 would make them harder for legislators to attack in the future—for example, if New York politics keep trending rightward.
Here’s where abortion comes in: The amendment also bans discrimination based on “pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.” Not only does that definition go farther than any other state, it leaves little room for judges to interpret in ways that might limit abortion access, according to Katharine Bodde, of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Yet while New York Democrats initially viewed Prop. 1 as a surefire way to boost voter turnout, their right-wing opponents have seized on transphobic messaging to great effect—making this blue-state fight unexpectedly close.
The Yes on Prop. 1 campaign declared victory on Twitter on Tuesday night. “While the world waits for the national election results, tonight,” the campaign posted. “New York State lived up to our motto, ‘ever upward,’ and took an extraordinary step forward in our enduring work to build freedom for all.”
