On Election Day, voters in 10 states considered measures that directly, or indirectly, would incorporate a right to abortion in their state constitution. Seven of those measures passed; three were defeated.

In the former category are five states — Colorado, Maryland, Montana, New York, and Nevada (the Nevada measure must be approved a second time by the voters in 2026 before it takes effect) — where for either political or legal reasons (a hostile state supreme court), there was no possibility of enacting an enforceable law prohibiting abortion. This category also includes two other states, Arizona and Missouri, where the measures adopted would overturn or prevent enforcement of pro-life laws.

Measures to constitutionalize abortion rights were defeated in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Nebraska approved an amendment requiring the legislature to prohibit abortions after the first trimester, except in limited circumstances. (The amendment did not address the constitutional status of first trimester abortions.)

The passage of the pro-abortion measures in Arizona and Missouri was especially disappointing, but the defeat of the measure in Florida, one of our most populous states (helped by a requirement that any amendment be approved by 60% of the voters), was very heartening. Significantly, the results in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota mark the first pro-life victories in statewide ballot measures since the Kansas neutrality amendment was defeated in August 2022, shortly after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Moreover, the defeat of the pro-abortion measures in these three states, especially in Nebraska and South Dakota (where the pro-abortion measure was rejected by a margin of almost three to two), is likely to deter abortion advocates from pursuing citizen initiatives in three other states: Arkansas, North Dakota, and Oklahoma.

In fact, abortion advocates have likely reached the end of the line in using citizen initiatives to incorporate abortion rights into state constitutions. Citizen initiatives to amend state constitutions (bypassing state legislatures) are not allowed in 17 states with laws on the books prohibiting abortion either throughout pregnancy (13 states) or at least after 12 weeks (four states).

State constitutional amendments in these states — Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming — may be proposed only by the state legislature. It is unlikely that the legislatures in any of these states would propose an amendment to constitutionalize abortion rights.

How state ballot measures on abortion fared is only part of the story from the election, however. Abortion advocates and their allies in the Democratic Party and the media tried to make abortion a deciding issue in both national and state elections. In that effort, they failed and failed conspicuously.

At the national level, Donald Trump was elected president, the Republicans seized control of the Senate and held their majority in the House, notwithstanding overwrought and overheated rhetoric warning that Republicans, if put in charge, would enact a national abortion ban. At the state level, the Republicans did not lose control of the Governor’s Mansion in any state, including states that have enacted legislation protecting unborn children: Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia. And the Republicans did not lose control of any state legislative chamber or any state supreme court where candidates run under party labels. The results in state judicial races are particularly noteworthy.

Abortion advocates, again assisted by their allies in the Democratic Party, attempted to defeat, either in retention votes or contested elections, more than a dozen state supreme court justices in six states who had voted to uphold state laws prohibiting abortion or who were otherwise viewed as “pro-life.” All thirteen justices won their races: two in Arizona (Clint Bolick and Kathryn King), two in Florida (Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso), three in Indiana (Loretta Rush, Mark Masso, and Derek Molter), two in Missouri (Kelly Broniec and Ginger Gooch), one in Ohio (Joseph Deters), and three in Texas (Jane Bland, Jimmy Blacklock, and John Devine).

In two other races, Republican candidates Megan Shanahan and Dan Hawkins defeated Democratic candidates for two seats on the Ohio Supreme Court, giving the Republicans a majority of five to two. On the other hand, one of the justices on the Oklahoma Supreme Court, who was part of a majority opinion recognizing a right to abortion under the Oklahoma Constitution (Yvonne Kauger), was defeated in her retention vote, the first justice on the state Supreme Court ever to have lost a retention vote. In another judicial race, a conservative Republican defeated a liberal Democrat for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court, increasing Republican dominance of that court.

What is important to understand from the foregoing review of state and federal election results is that there is almost a complete disconnect between how people vote on the abortion issue, viewed in isolation, and how they vote on candidates for executive, legislative, and judicial offices. This, in turn, means that being conservative and pro-life (or even being thought of as conservative and pro-life) is no obstacle to election. In other words, regardless of how the public might vote on an abortion-specific ballot measure (and, as noted above, we probably won’t be seeing any more such measures on the ballot, at least in conservative states), being conservative and pro-life is not a disqualifying political liability. Indeed, quite the opposite. And that is the hidden pro-life story of the 2024 election.