Voters Show Strong Support for Reproductive Rights and Minimum Wage

November 9, 2006

While much of the focus of the 2006 midterm elections has been on the potential shift of power in Congress, voters also considered many crucial ballot measures on Tuesday. Taking the form of initiatives, referenda, and constitutional amendments, the 2006 ballot measures covered a range of political issues, including abortion access, parental notification for abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action and minimum wage. For women's rights advocates, as usual, there were wins as well as losses.

Abortion Rights Protected in Three States

In South Dakota, voters overturned by 56% to 44% the ban on nearly all abortions that was passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor earlier this year. The ban, which provides no exceptions to permit an abortion in cases of rape or incest, or to protect the woman's health, was clearly intended as a challenge to Roe v. Wade.

Voters in California and Oregon also faced down challenges to reproductive rights in the form of laws requiring parental notification before a young woman can seek an abortion. . Both Proposition 85, which was defeated in California, and Ballot Measure 43, voted down in Oregon, would have required that young women seeking abortions wait 48 hours while their parents are given written notice about the intended procedure. Californians voted down another notification measure, Prop. 73, in 2005.

Marriage Bans; No Benefits for Unmarried Couples

We scored a major victory for equal marriage rights in Arizona, where, for the first time in this country, voters defeated a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, voters passed marriage bans in seven other states: Colorado, Idaho, Wisconsin, South Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Except for Colorado and Tennessee, the new bans don't stop at defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, but they also prohibit any form of civil union or domestic partnership that "approximates" marriage for unmarried couples. These laws will have wide-ranging impacts on the lives of unmarried same-sex and opposite-sex couples, impacting, among many concerns, health insurance coverage, hospital visitation rights, parenting rights, and domestic violence protections. Already a state court in Ohio has ruled that state domestic violence protections don't apply to violence in a relationship where the parties are not married.

Affirmative Action Banned

Despite tremendous efforts by women's and civil rights organizations to inform and turn out voters in Michigan to defeat the affirmative action measure, voters approved the ballot measure ending the state's affirmative action programs. The measure, similar to the initiatives passed in California and Washington, bans any gender-based or race-based affirmative action programs in government and public institutions, including education, employment and contracting.  

Passage of the measure will likely mean the end of programs that help women achieve pay equity with men (Michigan has one of the largest wage gaps in the nation), targeted scholarships and apprenticeships for women and minorities, including programs that encourage girls to study math and science, and business enterprise programs for women and minorities. A a result, women and minority-owned businesses will have an increasingly difficult time competing for and securing public contracts, and higher education programs will no longer be allowed to conduct recruitment and retention activities targeted to achieve a diverse student body.  

Proponents of the measure worked actively to mislead voters about the actual intent of the ballot measure, going so far as to name it the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), when in fact it was just the opposite. There were numerous reports of individuals being told that the MCRI was pro-affirmative action, and that a "yes" vote on the measure would protect the very programs that it will now overturn.

Minimum Wage Increased

Although Congress has refused to increase the federal minimum wage since 1997, voters approved state minimum wage increases in all six states where the issue was on the Tuesday ballot: Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio. It is particularly important that each of these ballot measures ties future increases in the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, so that we would not need to fight for a new a ballot measure every few years.

Minimum wage laws with a built-in escalation based on inflation, like the six new laws, are currently on the books in Oregon, Vermont and Washington state. With the momentum driven by these states and the new members of Congress, there is hope that the 110th Congress will pass a federal minimum wage increase tied to inflation.