After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled out federal constitutional rights to abortion, voters in 10 states ratified the state amendment that more broadly codified abortion and reproductive rights. All of these initiatives reflect public demands to restore constitutional protections, but not all take the same approach to doing so.
There are considerable differences in the texts of these amendments, and these differences affect the way the court interprets the scope of the new assurance and evaluates the laws challenged under them. With dozens of abortion restrictions still in these 10 state books, abortion rights advocates first turned to courts to regain and expand access to abortion. However, most modifications offer much broader guarantees.
A new UCLA Law Center report on Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy analyzes this developing landscape and what it means to realize the promise of reforming state reproductive freedom.
In ten states, Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New York, Ohio and Vermont, voters ratified state constitutional amendments to establish new or stronger protections for reproductive rights. These breakwaters are not only directed against criminal abortion bans, but they could also unlock decades of limitations that limit and undermine the accessibility, affordability and dignity of abortion care. As we found in our study, more than 50 laws restricting abortion (including those currently challenged or prohibited) were in books in these 10 states at the time the amendment was ratified. These range from abortion bans to targeted regulations and funding for abortion providers, including recognizing forced counseling and delay requirements, privilege and institutional requirements.
Several state courts have already realised that many of these laws have long been valid or bound by the constitution under previous federal precedents – they can no longer stand under the constitutional guarantees of new states. The initial decision is promising, but it will require continued implementation efforts and further interpretation by the courts to fully protect the legal rights guaranteed by the new amendments. Beyond that, supporters of these amendments, and voters who ratify them, must dodge new anti-abortion strategies that seek to directly undo the amendments themselves.
To date, four state lawsuits have resulted in state court decisions that have applied new amendments to block the ban and limit abortion restrictions. The decisions in Arizona and Ohio permanently banned those states, and Michigan courts have detained three unconstitutional abortion regulations that have made access to state abortion care difficult. As an Ohio court explained, its 2023 reproductive freedom amendment is “a lot more advanced” than simply restoring the legal standards set out. Roev. WadeIt was overturned in 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Agency. This amendment provides a provision that indirectly burdens, punishes, prohibits, obstructs, or discriminates against the right to presumably invalidate the right to abort pre-pregnancy.
Some states that recently passed amendments to protect abortion access have intensified the fight for reproductive rights. In Missouri, for example, state courts initially found that many of the state’s pregnancy bans and abortion restrictions likely were unconstitutional based on reproductive freedom amendments, but the new legislative initiative is trying to revoke the amendments. Six months after voters approved the amendment, anti-abortion lawmakers passed a referendum that abolished and banned almost all abortions in the state if approved by voters. The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenges the new referendum as misleading and inaccurate, and the pending decision in that case will allow you to determine whether you are on the ballot in November 2026.
It is naive to ignore the prospects of future hostile state court decisions, or more voting initiatives that undermine the intentions and impacts of new constitutional reforms, particularly for abortion access. Still, there is power in how amendments to state reproductive freedom can shape public and judicial understandings of long-term constitutional rights.
Virtually all reproductive freedom modifications expressly link positive rights that arise in broader and fundamental constitutional guarantees, such as equality, freedom, and autonomy. Seven amendments use languages of equality, equal protection, or non-discrimination to protect reproductive decisions and outcomes (California, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio) and identify six constitutional guarantees as one of “freedom” (California, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Missouri) or “self-york). Additionally, both Maryland and Vermont describe their rights as a matter of “freedom” and Vermont and Missouri expressly guarantee “dignity” and “respect.” And it almost protects the broader reproductive decisions and health rights beyond abortion. Almost everything generally in a specific language ensures decisions and health care that are important for mothers’ health rights, birth justice, family formation, and more. Seven of the 10 designate judicial reviews with extremely demanding standards.
Such framing and language, like decades-long landmark state Supreme Court decisions, assert that multiple constitutional guarantees protect the broader rights to abortion and reproductive autonomy. And while our research focused on the most pressing effects of abortion laws, there are plenty of other state interventions that violate the health, autonomy and dignity of pregnant people who are violating the state’s reproductive freedom modifications. At least one pending lawsuit makes that claim. Vermont and Pregnancy Justice ACLU claims that when they received confidential health information about their client’s pregnancy, they obtained a department for children and families in Vermont. ex part In order to obtain custody of her fetal child, she sought an injunction to force unwilling Caesarean surgery, and then she obtained custody of her newborn baby for seven months. They argue that the client and the state’s broader “patterns and practices of Vermonter surveillance during pregnancy significantly interfere with and violate reproductive freedom,” and that Vermont’s reproductive freedom amendments “prohibit further penalties or criminalization from (clients) protected health decisions and birth plans.”
Thus, state courts can lead the way in which they can build a more robust constitutional jurisprudence regarding reproductive rights, if they are faithful to the specific rights embodied in these amendments and the broader constitutional guarantees. Similarly, when we focus on our reports, it is up to voters, advocates, policymakers and legal scholars to ensure these, and future revisions will be developed and implemented in ways that bring us closer to reproductive justice.
Cathren Cohen is a staff attorney at UCLA Law’s center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy.
Diana Kasdan is the Law and Policy Director for UCLA Law’s Center for Reproductive Health, Law, and Policy.
