PHOENIX (CN) — Arizona House Democrats were thwarted Wednesday morning in their attempt to repeal a 160-year-old abortion ban, but they may have another shot next week.
Just one week after the state Supreme Court revived a Civil War-era ban that was enacted 48 years before Arizona became a state and 55 years before women won the right to vote, Democrats are trying to push through a bill that would remove the ban from the books.
Across the Capitol lawn, Democrats in the state Senate drafted a mirror bill in just 30 minutes that would repeal the ban, voting to suspend the rules to get it a first read Wednesday afternoon. Three Republicans voted alongside Democrats to give them the majority necessary to get the bill on the calendar. It will receive a second read next week.
Democrats in the House didn't have the same luck.
State Representative Stephanie Stahl-Hamilton, a Democrat from Tucson and sponsor of House Bill 2677, raised a motion on the floor to suspend House rules, bypassing committee hearings and moving her bill straight to a vote. Though it was assigned to three committees over the course of the session, the bill never got a hearing in any of the Republican-controlled committees, an issue Democrats have protested all year.
Republicans called a point of order to Stahl-Hamilton’s motion, pointing to House Rule 31, which says rules can only be suspended if the Speaker of the House, Ben Toma, approves. Toma rejected Stahl-Hamilton’s motion.
“The last thing that we should be doing is rushing the legislative process to repeal a law that has been enacted and reaffirmed by the legislature several times,” the Republican from Phoenix told the chamber. “Abortion is a very complicated topic. It is ethically, morally, complex. Respect the fact that some of us believe that abortion is in fact the murder of children.”
Toma added that suspending the rules would mean cutting out the voices of Arizonans that would otherwise be heard in committee.
Democrats requested a roll-call vote to overturn Toma’s decision, but members split 30-30, meaning the vote failed to bring the bill up for a vote.
“We heard the speaker mention that we shouldn’t be rushing this process,” said state Representative Oscar De Los Santos, a Democrat from Laveen. “Members, we have had since 1864 to repeal this abhorrent law,” he said. “Democrats have introduced this bill for six years and have been ignored in every single one of them.”
House Speaker Pro Tempore Travis Grantham moved the House into recess after the vote.
Upon return Wednesday afternoon, Democrats requested a vote to alter the rules further, so that they could vote on the repeal bill without Toma's approval. Republicans made a substitute motion to adjourn for the day, which succeeded on a party line vote.
Both the House and the Senate are meeting only once a week on Wednesdays from now until the end of the session, so House Democrats will have to wait seven days before they can re-up their effort to repeal the ban. The bill in the Senate can receive only one reading per week, so it won't be up for a vote for another two weeks. If it passes the Senate, it will be sent to the House, where it will likely run into the same procedural issues that HB2677 is facing now.
Republican state Representative Matt Gress of Phoenix was the only Republican to vote with House Democrats to suspend the rules Wednesday morning.
“Quite frankly, the territorial law is too extreme,” he told a gaggle of reporters after the recess. “On the other hand you have the Arizona Abortion Access Act, which I believe is too extreme. A 15-week timeframe with reasonable exceptions is where most of Arizona is.”
He isn’t the only Republican leader against the territorial ban.
Both Gress and state Senator T.J. Shope of Coolidge took to X, formerly Twitter, after the state Supreme Court issued its decision, calling for more “reasonable” restrictions and a return to the post-15-week ban that reigned before the court’s decision.
Gress tried to initiate a vote on Stahl-Hamilton’s bill last week, but was interrupted by a motion to recess followed by a weeklong adjournment.
State Representative David Cook, a Republican from Globe, agreed with Gress on the House floor last week, but voted against the rule suspension Wednesday.
Some Democrats expected state Representative Tim Dunn, a Republican from Yuma, to vote across the aisle as well. But under the gaze of a raucous crowd of mostly anti-abortion Arizonans in the gallery, Dunn fell in line with his Republican colleagues.
The territorial ban, Section 13-3603, was stayed from enforcement in 1973 after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which codified a right to abortion at the federal level. Despite that ruling, the Legislature recodified the ban in 1977 to make a political point to how Republican leaders felt about abortion.
After nearly 50 years of precedent, the high court reversed its stance in 2022, putting the abortion issue back in the hands of states and effectively reviving Arizona’s territorial ban with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
The Arizona legislature passed its 15-week abortion ban, Title 36, just months before Roe v. Wade was overturned. The aftermath left two conflicting laws on the books to be reconciled by the state Supreme Court.
In a 4-2 decision, the six Republican-appointed justices sided with the older law, allowing the state to prosecute anyone who performs an abortion.
The court added a 14-day stay on the ban to allow litigants to address constitutionality concerns in a state trial court. A federal judge in a separate case placed a 45-day stay on the ban’s enforcement, meaning abortions won’t be illegal for at least three months from the date of the ruling.
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