One small point of consolation for New York Democrats undone by the results of the presidential election was the passage of the state’s Equal Rights Amendment, with a 62 percent majority. The ballot measure, known as Proposition 1, introduced a prospective amendment to the State Constitution that would expand and strengthen existing anti-bias protections, the goal being to ensure that no one could be denied rights based on who they were or what they might do to or with their bodies.
Liz Krueger, a longtime Democratic state senator, started talking about the need for this sort of change four years ago. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the issue took on a new urgency.
Although the language in the ballot avoids the word “abortion,” the measure was intended to codify the right to terminate a pregnancy beyond what the relevant statute — New York’s Reproductive Health Act of 2019 — already allowed. This seemed essential to Democrats in the event that changes in the State Legislature might someday produce a conservative leadership that would try to make abortion illegal.
Since the 1930s, New York’s Constitution has barred discrimination based on race, color or creed. The purpose of the amendment was to add new categories, among them: ethnicity, national origin, age, disability and “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes and reproductive health care and autonomy.”
If the language seems vague or convoluted, it is not for a neglect of semantic debate. The original text of Proposition 1, recommended by the state attorney general’s office, did, in fact, feature the word “abortion.” But the Board of Elections didn’t approve it. Advocates then sued to have it included on the grounds that the new wording violated a state law, passed last year, requiring that any prospective constitutional amendment or referendum be written in “plain language” at or below an eighth-grade reading level. A judge disagreed.
That the measure would find such strong support among voters wasn’t necessarily obvious, even if the polling around it suggested a certain popularity. Abortion opponents and others generally antagonistic to progressive social initiatives flooded money into the war to defeat it. One was Dick Uihlein, a Schlitz beer heir and shipping magnate who contributed $6.5 million to the political action committee Vote No on Prop 1; he previously spent $4 million in what became the unsuccessful effort to crush Ohio’s abortion amendment last November.
In New York, “once it was on the ballot, there were millions of dollars of negative ads lying about the objectives of this,” Gov. Kathy Hochul told me on Wednesday afternoon.
One opposition group, the Coalition to Protect Kids-NY, organized against the suggested amendment on the notion that its opaque language could result in the subjugation of parents to the agendas of radical trans activists. One ad offered up a hypothetical child and her devoted mother, Jackie. As the narrator warns listeners: “They call it the Equal Rights Amendment. But it should be called the Parent Replacement Act.” If 7-year-old Chloe “wanted to try life as a boy,” the ad claimed, “her school will help her transition, without Jackie ever knowing.”
The measure does not allow children to transition without parental involvement, according to the New York City Bar Association.
Less fantastical arguments rejecting the amendment came from people like Joseph Borrelli, a Republican member of New York’s City Council. In his view, it was precisely the airiness of the language — the absence of any mention of abortion in the text — that led to him believe that there was a stealth endgame embedded in the measure.
“There is no threat to abortion in New York State; it’s not happening,” he said in an interview with The Staten Island Advance last week. “The goal is to use the issue of abortion to implement different protections that probably could not pass on their own.” He and others worried about the aperture widening for transgender girls playing in girls’ sports.
The coalition advancing the proposal, New Yorkers for Equal Rights, came together as an assemblage of union members, civil rights organizations, immigrant groups and those who have been fighting for reproductive rights. “The important thing we tried to emphasize from the beginning was that we should keep this fight about rights out of the partisan framework,” Sasha Ahuja, who ran the campaign for New Yorkers for Equal Rights, told me. “The more this is thought of as a Democratic thing, the worse it is.”
What is so striking about the amendment’s passage is the number of voters who came out in favor of it even in places where Donald Trump won handily. He took Nassau County by four points, for example, but 55 percent of voters there voted yes on Proposition 1. In Suffolk County, the former president won by 10 points, and yet a majority voted to enact the measure. Narrower disparities held in Orange and Essex counties upstate but emerged nevertheless.
If anything, this suggests the complexity of certain voter habits and counters the criticism that Democrats were out of touch with the concerns of ordinary, working Americans when they made gender and reproductive freedom such a noisy cause at the top of the ticket. In some of the reddest parts of the state, as Governor Hochul put it, “these are rights that women expect to have.”
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