With an insider who helped make it happen

By Samhita Mukhopadhyay 

Yesterday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office confirmed that over half a million people had signed to certify a ballot initiative that would enshrine access to abortion into the state constitution. According to NPR, that number represents the most signatures for a ballot measure in the history of the state.

And getting abortion into the constitution is crucial. Arizona’s abortion laws have been in the spotlight because of its 160-year-old “zombie” law, which briefly banned abortion throughout the state this spring. Thanks to (mostly female) legislator pressure, the law goes off the books next month, but “without a constitutional amendment another group of politicians can come right back in January and pass another extreme ban or continue to put onerous restrictions on access,” says Arizona for Abortion Access’ communications director Dawn Penich, whose coalition mobilized 7,000 volunteers to collect signatures.

We asked Penich three questions about this huge win, and what comes next. 

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: First of all, congratulations and thank you. You surpassed the numbers needed for certification by a lot. What was the process for getting there? And what was the hardest part? 

Dawn Penich: We’ve been working toward this for over a year at this point. It was last summer that we formed a coalition, started writing the language for this measure and forming a campaign and then spent more than nine months collecting signatures all over the state. And if you know anything about Arizona, that means that we were collecting in snowstorms, but also collecting in 115-degree weather. 

So I would say that was the hardest part, just asking our 7,000 volunteers to be out there day after day. But I have to tell you, it wasn’t hard because people are so driven and passionate about this issue that they said, yeah, it’s hot, but I don’t care. I need to be part of a solution. I need to be part of righting this wrong. And so getting the news yesterday that our signatures were certified and we are on the ballot just felt amazing and was a huge validation for the amount of work that we’ve been putting in and we’ll continue to put in for the next 90 days.

It just really proves the point that even in Arizona, which is considered a more conservative state on some issues, most voters support access to abortion.

That’s right. We totally saw that when we would be in…the red parts of town. More conservative people do come to this issue from a different perspective: They look at it as small government and keeping the government out of their private lives, whereas other people come to it through a women’s rights or a reproductive freedom lens. So people have different ways of coming to support access to abortion, and that’s why we were able to collect so many signatures. We also think we’re going to be the latest in the long line of reproductive freedom wins this November.

Were there any major efforts to push back on the initiative? 

There were some feeble attempts throughout the course of collecting our signatures. Folks would show up holding stop signs or try to lie about what our measure does and pass off misinformation. But I got to hand it to ’em: Arizona voters are smarter than that. It did nothing but backfire. They would kind of get the attention of people walking by, and then those people would say, Oh, is that the abortion access petition? Let me hurry up and sign that. We don’t take it lightly, but we do know that we are the majority, and that majority will turn out in November as well.