Some Nebraskans say misleading words led them to sign abortion petitions they don’t support

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Tea Rohrberg was heading to her county treasurer’s office in Omaha, Nebraska, on Monday when she said she was approached by a man and asked if she wanted to sign a “pro-choice petition.” . Believing that access to abortion is a right that all women should have, she signed promptly.

But Rohrberg soon learned from another volunteer that she had signed a petition being circulated by Protect Women and Children, which seeks to ask voters in November to codify Nebraska law. new 12 week abortion ban in the state constitution. She approached the man who she said coerced her into signing the petition, calling it a “pro-choice” measure. She told him she wanted to strike his name off the petition. He told her he would cross it out later, she said.

“I was like, ‘No, I just want my name out of this.’ So he said, ‘Well, then don’t vote later,'” she said.

Instead, what she did was go to the Omaha office of Protect Our Rights, which is trying to enshrine the right to abortion in the Nebraska Constitution, to file a notarized statement to have her name officially removed. She then signed the organization’s petition to protect the right to abortion through fetal viability or at any point in pregnancy to protect a woman’s health.

Rohrberg is far from the only one to be tricked into signing a petition about abortion in Nebraska. The Nebraska Secretary of State’s office said that as of Friday evening it had received 91 statements from voters seeking to have their names removed from an abortion petition.

The vast majority – 67 – came from those who wanted their name removed from Protect Women and Children or other petitions seeking to ban abortion. Only seven attempted to remove their names from a petition to protect abortion rights.

Protect Women and Children organizers did not return emails seeking comment.

Both sides accuse the other of dirty tricks to gather the roughly 123,000 signatures needed before Wednesday’s deadline to turn them in.

“They are explicitly lying to voters,” Allie Berry, Protect Our Rights campaign manager, said of organizers seeking to solidify Nebraska’s 12-week abortion ban. “They are using really deceptive tactics to get people to sign.”

On the other hand, Nebraska Right to Life Executive Director Sandy Danek said the group has heard from anti-abortion allies that circulators of the abortion rights petition tried to trick people into signing.

Nebraska is between at least seven states where initiatives aimed at codifying abortion and reproductive rights are proposed for a vote in November, the latest sign of the deep divisions created by the US Supreme Court’s decision two years ago to end a constitutional right to abortion.

In the wake of that decision, Republicans who dominate Nebraska’s state government sought to immediately issue restrictions on abortion, including a total abortion ban that failed in 2022. Last year, another bill failed that would have banned abortion around six weeks pregnant – earlier than most. women know they are pregnant.

Last year, lawmakers agreed to a 12-week ban, with exceptions for rape, incest and saving the life of the mother.

Abortion rights advocates in the state have been encouraged by ballot initiatives elsewhere that have enshrined the right to abortion or rejected attempts to restrict it.

Nearly 6 in 10 Nebraska voters in the 2022 midterm elections said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and about 8 in 10 said the state should allow abortion if the mother’s health is seriously impaired. threatened by pregnancy, according to AP VoteCast, a broad survey of the electorate. Just under half said Nebraska should allow legal abortion if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant for any reason.

Anti-abortion advocates have filed at least three petitions this year, including an initiative that seeks to ban abortion at all stages of pregnancy by recognizing embryos as persons. It is unlikely to get the number of signatures needed to get on the November ballot.

The petition to codify a 12-week abortion ban in the state constitution is being funded almost exclusively by Nebraska multimillionaires, including Republican U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts — one of the Senate’s richest members — who donated $1 million of his own money for the US$2 million raised.

The Nebraska Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of the Roman Catholic Church in Nebraska, has been blanketing the state with presentations to boost support for the 12-week ban petition for months. The conference’s Marion Miner said in a June 6 presentation that anti-abortion groups would prefer a blanket ban that makes no exceptions for rape and incest, but acknowledged they are unlikely to win public support.

“This has been tried in other states in recent years and has not been competitive even in very pro-life states,” he said.