A Silver Lining for New York Democrats

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.