Michigan Abortion Battle Likely Headed for State's Supreme Court After Deadlock

David Welch
·3 min read
14

(Bloomberg) -- The abortion battle in Michigan is likely headed to the state’s Supreme Court after a bipartisan committee deadlocked along party lines about whether to include on the November ballot a proposal to make the procedure legal.

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The state’s four-member board voted 2-2, which keeps the measure off the ballot and sets up a legal fight in which the referendum’s sponsors will have to sue to put the popular measure before the state’s voters. The panel’s vote is supposed to be procedural, simply verifying that the measure got the needed 450,000 signatures and that the ballot language is clear. Its sponsors collected more than 700,000 names.

But the effort was beset with challenges from the beginning, and this battle is the latest in a series of state-by-state skirmishes being waged in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which kicked the abortion question back to the states to decide. A ballot measure guaranteeing the right to legal abortion would have a high chance of succeeding in Michigan, a key swing state, after a referendum on abortion rights was surprisingly approved by Kansas voters earlier this month.

Wednesday’s decision came down to complaints over spacing between words and complaints about the text in the document, not the validity of the proposal. The Board of Canvassers can vote only to verify that a ballot initiative has enough signatures and that the documents meet basic standards. A formatting error mashed some words together, and the proposal’s opponents seized on that to push for invalidation.

Read more: Abortion-rights win in Kansas hints at risks for GOP in midterms

Reproductive Freedom For All, a group led by the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood of Michigan, sponsored the bill and will now have to sue to get the measure on the ballot, said Mark Brewer, a Michigan attorney who worked on a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood earlier this year with the state Supreme Court to keep abortion legal.

“There will probably be a suit filed first thing Thursday morning,” Brewer said in an interview.

Polls show that legal abortion is supported by a wide margin in Michigan, and Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has made it a key issue against Republican opponent Tudor Dixon, has an 11-point lead, according to a recent Epic-MRA poll. Dixon has said she opposes legal abortion in all cases, including pregnancy resulting from rape or incest.

GOP Opposition

The two Republicans on the committee sided with appeals that the petition itself was sloppily written, lacked spacing between words and wasn’t clear enough for voters to fully understand.

“We would not sign a mortgage that had this type of mistake in it, you would not turn in a term paper with this kind of mistake in it,” said Tony Daunt, a Republican who chairs the Board of Canvassers.

The US Supreme Court’s decision has already set off rounds of legal wrangling over abortion because Michigan has an old law on its books that was passed in 1846 and updated in 1931 that makes abortion illegal in all cases. Whitmer sued before the US Supreme Court decision was announced, asking the state’s highest court to rule that its constitution overrides the 1931 law.

While the Michigan Supreme Court weighs that case, two different rulings have stopped the old law from going into effect, the latest coming in August when a Circuit Court judge issued an order blocking enforcement.

In at least three of the 13 counties that have abortion clinics, prosecutors have said they would enforce the ban.

“I do not believe it is proper for me to simply ignore a law, any law, that was passed by the Michigan legislature and signed by the governor” in 1931, said Chris Becker in Kent County, on the west side of the state.

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