Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights turns in ‘record’ 117K signatures for abortion petition

Posters for Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, the group behind CI-128 in 2024. (Photo by Blair Miller, Daily Montanan)

The group behind a proposed constitutional amendment to protect abortion access in Montana said Friday it had submitted 117,000 signatures from every county in the state – nearly double the number needed for the measure to make the ballot in November.

Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights said that is the most signatures gathered for any ballot initiative in state history, and they are confident they will meet the threshold required of just more than 60,000 when counties finish counting and verifying the signatures by July 19.

“Here in Montana, our rights are being targeted by extreme anti-abortion politicians who are trying every single trick in the book to rip away our freedom to make private medical decisions,” said Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana CEO Martha Fuller. “…With just over two months to gather the signatures, a fierce group of supporters and volunteers have shown us all that Montanans are ready to defend our reproductive rights.”

The group said in addition to gathering signatures in every county, signatures also came from all 100 House districts. State law requires constitutional amendment petitions to have signatures from 10% of voters in 40 different House districts.

Once the counties verify the signatures for Constitutional Initiative 128 by July 19, the Secretary of State will have until Aug. 22 to certify statewide ballots for the election and tell the group it has qualified for the ballot in November if that is the case.

Abortion is legal in Montana after the Montana Supreme Court in 1999 found Montanans’ right to privacy includes a right to abortion access. The initiative would amend the constitution to “expressly provide a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion” and prohibit the government from interfering in an abortion before a fetus is viable.

Akilah Deernose, the executive director of the ACLU of Montana, said the group had more than 500 volunteers who helped gather signatures and that the number of signatures the group gathered showed how invigorated Montanans are to vote on the proposal in November.

“Montanans have made it clear that they are sick and tired of anti-abortion extremists interfering with their private medical decisions, and so today, we could not be more excited for where we are,” Deernose said.

Planned Parenthood Advocates of Montana and the ACLU of Montana, along with Forward Montana, were the three original organizations that started Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights last November to try to get the proposal onto this year’s ballot.

On Friday, the group noted the challenges it had faced in getting to this point. After having to fight Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen on the proposed language and then the process to get to the signature gathering phase for months, signature gatherers for the group faced what the group said was intimidation and threats from a “small and vocal” group of anti-abortion advocates.

The group started hosting park-and-sign and drop-in signing events in recent weeks to avoid those opponents and to make it easier for people to sign the petition, group officials said Friday.

Campaign finance reports show Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights has raised more than $3 million so far for its campaign. Fuller said that money would all go toward trying to convince as many Montanans as possible between now and November to support the issue as the group can. It also plans to launch field and media campaigns for CI-128, Fuller said.

“[We’re] making sure we’re talking to as many Montanans as possible between now and November in as many channels as we can across the state,” Fuller said. “…We’ll be really eager to get our message out there and get our message across in a very busy season.”

Taryn Van Steeland, the reproductive rights organizer for Forward Montana, said the group knows that anti-abortion groups will continue to fight against the initiative by challenging signatures and interfering with the group’s messaging campaign. Fuller called their efforts so far “an embarrassment to the kind and neighborly and accepting nature of Montana.”

“We’re not unfamiliar with this. Those of us who work in this space deal with anti-choice activity fairly often, and we have a lot of experience in keeping volunteers safe and making sure that people are following best practices,” Fuller said. “But in the end, folks want to talk about this; they want to learn about this. Volunteers are excited to get out and talk to their friends and family about this, and we’re really excited to move into that phase.”

The political efforts to restrict abortion in Montana in recent years have come from Republicans in the legislature and the Gianforte administration, but those efforts have been largely struck down by the courts.

Nationwide, groups largely aligned with Democrats are hoping to get similar constitutional amendment proposals on ballots in states, which are now in charge of setting their own laws surrounding abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Dobbs case.

A separate group called Montanans for Choice announced this week it was launching a series of billboards and digital ads highlighting “reproductive freedom as a Montana value” to help bring abortion into this year’s election conversation.

But Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights said CI-128 “will remain a nonpartisan issue.”

“This is about protecting rights and freedoms, and that’s not a partisan issue,” Deernose said.

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