On the second anniversary of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Arizona Democrats are making abortion access the centerpoint of their campaigns up and down the ballot.
Democratic elected officials appeared together to criticize Republicans like former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake for their support of laws restricting access to abortion.
“We have extremist Kari Lake, who looked at what the United States Supreme Court did, and said the 1864 ban on abortion was a great law,” said former lawmaker Athena Salman, who now works for Reproductive Freedom for All, referencing comments Lake made supporting Arizona’s since-repealed territorial-era near-total abortion ban.
Salman appeared alongside Arizona Democratic Party Chairwoman Yolanda Bejarano and Attorney General Kris Mayes to highlight Democratic wins on the issue this year, including the repealing that ban, which dates back to 1864.
“It was Democrats who for 22 days held Republicans accountable for the 1864 decision,” Bejarano said.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in April that the territorial-era ban could be enforced in Arizona even though Republican lawmakers passed a 15-week abortion ban in 2022. That led a coalition of Democrats and a handful of Republican lawmakers to repeal the near-total ban in May.
That repeal won’t take effect until Sept. 14, but the old law still is unlikely to become enforceable, because series of legal maneuvers by Mayes delayed the ruling’s effective date until Sept. 26.
That means the 15-week ban is again the law of the land in Arizona, though abortion rights groups are also gathering signatures to put an abortion access initiative before voters in November that would add abortion access guarantees to the state Constitution..
Mayes said her office will release a legal opinion on Thursday requested by lawmakers to outline when abortions are legal in Arizona under the 15-week ban.
In a letter to Mayes, those lawmakers said the opinion is needed to clear up that confusion and provide clarity for medical providers who fear prosecution if they violate the law.
To craft that opinion, Mayes said her office spoke with doctors, nurses and leadership at major Arizona hospital systems.
“We've asked them for their medical opinion about this,” Mayes said. “We've asked them for what they are – the kinds of decisions that they're making on a nightly basis about how close to death they need to allow a woman to get before they think they can be prosecuted.”
Mayes was unsure if her office spoke with the lawmakers who wrote the 2022 law to understand what they meant by “medical emergency.”
“We certainly have looked at the legislative intent,” Mayes said. “We've looked at the record. We looked at the law itself, and we have looked at other case law and compared it against other case law. We've also looked at it in terms of our Constitution.”
