Voters in multiple states across the U.S. voted in favor of abortion Nov. 3 as Democrats retook the U.S. House and Senate in a stinging rebuke of President Donald Trump’s final term.
The Democratic Party flipped roughly three dozen seats across the House and Senate on election night, giving them strong majorities in both chambers, including a 10-seat advantage in the Senate.
The results were hailed by Democrat supporters as a sharp backlash to Trump’s second and last term in the White House, during which the president has presided over an unpopular war with Iran along with record-high gas prices and continuing high costs of groceries and other consumer goods.
Abortion advocates, meanwhile, recorded significant wins at the state level on Election Day, with voters in multiple states passing measures expanding abortion or else voting down efforts to restrict it.
In Virginia, voters passed an amendment to the state constitution guaranteeing abortion rights to “every individual.” Critics have argued that the measure will extend unfettered abortion rights even to children, undermining parental rights and putting young girls at risk. Though passed, the measure is still the subject of legal actions challenging its validity.
“Tragically, a majority of Virginians voted this election season to insert an extreme and limitless legal right to abortion into our Commonwealth’s constitution,” Bishop Michael F. Burbidge said in a statement. “Despite this defeat, faithful Catholics may be consoled by the certainty that each one of us gave God our best efforts, and that he will not allow those efforts to be in vain.”
In Nevada, meanwhile, voters approved a constitutional amendment that will allow unborn babies in the state to be aborted up to the point of “viability” with no restrictions. The proposal passed overwhelmingly with more than 60% support.
Elsewhere, in Missouri, voters rejected a proposal to reinstitute a state ban on abortion. About 55% of the state’s voters rejected the proposal, which leaves in place the rule allowing abortion through “fetal viability.”
Amid major victories for abortion supporters on Election Day, however, Idaho voters rejected an effort there to expand abortion rights.
The measure, which was voted down roughly 56% to 44%, would have established “a right to reproductive freedom and privacy” in the state and would have ordered that the government could not interfere with most abortion-related decisions.
Catholic bishops and advocates in the contested states had urged voters to reject the abortion proposals. Virginia’s two bishops had mounted a “Catholics Vote No” campaign to rally Catholic voters against the amendment.
Las Vegas Archbishop George Leo Thomas, meanwhile, had described the Nevada proposal as a “very serious and damaging expansion” of abortion law there. As in Virginia, the newly passed Nevada measure extends abortion rights to “individuals”; pro-life advocates have warned that such language potentially opens the door for doctors to perform unregulated abortions on underage girls.
Also in Virginia, voters repealed the state’s longstanding ban on same-sex “marriage,” a largely symbolic gesture given the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalized those arrangements throughout the U.S.
The Catholic Herald contributed to this story.
