Proponents of Maryland’s 2024 ballot question on abortion aim to match success of earlier, more politically complicated era

Three decades ago, it was nearly an even match.

Abortion-rights proponents and anti-abortion activists — at the culmination of a dramatic three-year political battle in the halls of the State House and across Maryland — turned out thousands of volunteers and flooded the airwaves with ads, spending practically dollar-for-dollar in the lead-up to the 1992 election.

“Privacy, safety, choice,” the ads supporting abortion said. “Make them get it right,” said the opposition.

The question at hand: whether Maryland would codify the protections of Roe v. Wade in what was then seen as the unlikely event that the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case would be overturned.

That ballot question was ultimately approved by 60% of voters — above expectations at a time when support for abortion rights among the public and elected officials in liberal-leaning Maryland was not automatic.

Now, for the first time since that historic ballot measure, Maryland voters will have the chance to make their voices heard on whether abortion should be protected even further.

A question being prepared for the November 2024 ballot will ask voters whether reproductive freedom should be enshrined in the state constitution. And, once again, supporters are saying Maryland’s expected support shouldn’t be taken for granted.

“Everywhere you turn, individual rights are under attack, and border states like West Virginia have already implemented near total abortion bans. It’s critical we take steps now to ensure access in Maryland remains safe and reliable for the future,” said Erin Bradley, a top Planned Parenthood staffer in Maryland who is among the leaders of a new organization aimed at raising awareness for the 2024 ballot question.

Freedom in Reproduction Maryland, or FIRM, is an organization that’s just beginning to take shape. Among its goals will be to raise money to launch a campaign asking voters to support the constitutional amendment in the fall.

Advocates like Bradley acknowledge Maryland’s ballot question is in better standing than other, more conservative states like Ohio and Kansas that have already shown voters widely support keeping access to abortions since the fall of Roe in June 2022. Both before and after the Supreme Court’s decision, Maryland elected pro-abortion rights Democrats by overwhelming margins statewide and passed new laws to expand abortion access, including the language for the constitutional amendment in early 2023.

But veterans of Maryland’s last public battle on abortion rights agree — even though Maryland is in a very different place politically than it was in the early 1990s, where Democrats now almost unilaterally agree on the issue and where polls show nearly three-quarters of the public support access — the abortion question will require a serious campaign.

“Polls are polls, but people showing up to the ballot box are two totally different things,” said Steven Rivelis, who, in 1990, chaired a political action committee whose sole mission was to elect abortion rights candidates and unseat anti-abortion incumbents in the Maryland General Assembly.

Rivelis’ work that year was spurred by a dramatic eight-day filibuster that killed legislation that would have protected abortion rights. Democrats were on both sides of the issue, split along a divide that at the time was more religious than partisan.

“Every once in a while an issue comes up that has moral issues attached to it that nobody wants to face, but you have to face it,” recalled former Democratic Sen. Frank Kelly, who was one of the anti-abortion floor leaders during the filibuster.

Kelly, of Baltimore County, said his position, one that he still holds, was based on his Catholic faith and on his personal history. His mother, he said, chose not to have an abortion when she was five months pregnant with him even though a doctor discovered a cyst that was potentially cancerous.

“I don’t think any of us wanted to deny a woman the right to make a decision,” Kelly said of the 16 legislators, 13 Democrats and three Republicans, who were known as the “blocks of granite” for holding up the bill. “But there are two lives: The mother and the child. And the child can’t speak for itself.”

The 1990 legislation failed after an attempt to send two versions of the bill, a more expansive abortion-access bill and another more restrictive version, to voters to let them decide.

Rivelis, who had been Planned Parenthood’s first full-time lobbyist in Maryland starting in 1981, said he was sitting in the Senate chamber gallery with other activists during the final vote.

“There was a fascinating degree of electricity on that day,” Rivelis said. “All of the work that we did up until then seemed to have indicated that we were supposed to win, so there was this sort of heightened sense of being deflated by one vote. Then folks sort of, within nanoseconds, went from this sort of being pissed off to channeling their anger to, ‘What do we do next?’”

Rivelis’ answer to that question was Choice PAC, a first-of-its-kind campaign committee in Maryland. He and others went to work targeting legislators at the center of the filibuster and recruiting candidates to unseat them.

The results were unequivocal. Four of the five targeted Democrats lost in the primary six months later, including multi-term incumbents like Kelly, who was running for a fourth four-year term. Kelly soon afterward switched his party affiliation to Republican, a move he said he could have done before the election in order to win in November, though he said he wasn’t willing to make the change just to win.

“My faith required me to stand up,” Kelly said. “I knew I was going to lose and I stuck with it.”

Del. Sandy Rosenberg, then a young lawyer not far removed from sitting in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s class on sex discrimination at Columbia Law School, had entered the House in 1983 as a staunch supporter of abortion rights, quickly becoming a prime sponsor of annual budget language requiring Medicaid to cover abortion care.

A floor leader in the House debates on codifying Roe’s protections, he called the filibuster a “bitter” fight that led directly to the sweeping changes in the election.

“They lost — without a doubt, no question — because of their opposition to the bill and their support for the filibuster,” Rosenberg said of the lawmakers. “We knew we had the votes after that election.”

That quickly proved true just a few months later. When the General Assembly reconvened for its annual 90-day session in early 1991, the legislation quickly passed and, in a rare bill signing ceremony early in the session, Gov. William Donald Schaefer approved the bill just 35 minutes after the final vote. Schaefer, a Democrat, had refused to take a position during the filibuster a year earlier.

Anti-abortion activists then successfully petitioned the bill to go to voters before taking effect — by collecting nearly 143,000 signatures, more than four times the required amount.

Rivelis recalled “there was a great deal of nervousness” heading into what became the November 1992 ballot question campaign.

“It’s one thing to line up the votes. You need the 24 in [the Senate] and 72 in the [House]. It is another thing to win in every precinct of the state,” Rivelis said, noting the financial resources needed to reach voters. “Everyone was nervous and biting their fingernails at that point.”

Both sides came out in full force, nearly evenly splitting $3 million in combined fundraising and spending in the weeks before Election Day, according to news reports at the time.

Torrents of radio and television ads were unleashed. Thousands of volunteers went door-knocking and “churchgoers found political flyers in their weekly bulletins,” according to a report from The Baltimore Sun.

The Vote kNOw Coalition even recruited Dr. Ben Carson — then the renowned pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins and eventual cabinet member in Republican former President Donald Trump’s administration — for a television ad that he quickly disavowed, apparently not understanding the impact of the proposed law, according to another Sun report.

“It was definitely a national cause for the anti-choice forces,” said Maura Keefe, who worked on the Maryland for Choice campaign and went on to a long career on Capitol Hill as a chief of staff for lawmakers.

Keefe said her group was “ecstatic” by the eventual win with 60% of the vote, which she attributes in part to the turnout generated by having Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, both Democrats, on the same ballot.

“We were very happy to be striking the old law off the books and preparing for what we thought was a remote possibility,” Keefe said, referring to the idea that national abortion protections could be wiped out with Roe. “It turned out to be less than remote.”

Keefe said it will be important for advocates to run a strong educational campaign again in 2024, especially as misinformation and attempts to “muddy the waters” spread in an attempt to make the question fail.

“You can’t just sort of expect that people will be pro-choice” and automatically come out to vote for the referendum, Keefe said. “You still need to tell them and get them to come out.”

Rosenberg similarly said advocates “can’t take anything for granted” because of false accusations that the language will allow for “abortions on demand.” Those claims were made at times by Republicans as lawmakers worked to pass the constitutional amendment language in early 2023.

It’s not yet clear what kind of messaging Freedom in Reproduction Maryland, still in its early stages of developing a strategy for 2024, will include in its campaign — or how much money it will need to get that message across.

In Ohio this fall, a state constitutional amendment to protect abortion access drew $70 million in combined fundraising and spending. In Kansas last year, a ballot question asking voters to remove abortion protections had a $22 million price tag. The abortion-rights sides overwhelmingly won in both cases, by 13 percentage points and 18 percentage points, respectively. Both states lean more conservative than Maryland, where the 2024 constitutional amendment will be widely expected to pass and may not require the same level of resources from advocates.

Bradley, the executive director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of DC, Maryland and Virginia who is helping lead the new FIRM group, said only that more information about the effort in Maryland will be shared in the coming weeks. But, she hinted, the effort is expected to be costly even in a state that looks far different in its stance on abortion rights than it did the last time the issue was on the ballot.

“With hundreds of millions of dollars spent on this fight nationally, we know this will be expensive and take the support of all of Maryland’s advocates,” Bradley said.