These women are fighting to make abortion a constitutional right in Nevada

Lindsey Harmon and Sue Burtch are harnessing the anger of Nevada’s women who want to control their own bodies—and keep the government out of their family planning decisions.

Sue Burtch was just 20 years old and in a relationship that she knew wouldn’t last when she discovered that she was accidentally pregnant.

It was 1977 and Roe v. Wade had made abortion a constitutional right just a few years before, but that didn’t mean that getting an abortion was easy for Burtch, who was living in Southern California at the time.

Burtch was very much alone. She couldn’t tell her parents.

“I would have been disowned,” she told The Nevadan. “My mom had a very strict Catholic upbringing.”

But she also knew her parents would have disowned her over the pregnancy as well. She realized that her only realistic choice in this difficult situation was to get an abortion.

“I was working and making about $2.50 an hour. I could hardly support myself, let alone bring a child into the world. It was a challenge,” she recalled. “I didn’t know about the existence of Planned Parenthood at that time and remember, in 1977, we couldn’t Google. I had no insurance, nothing.”

Burtch, who moved to Nevada in 2014, vividly remembers those dark days of sitting on her couch in the living room of her apartment, spending hours calling “around to different doctor’s offices and getting hung up on.”

“I finally found a physician who would do it. But there was no care beforehand. There was no care afterwards. It was just outpatient surgery. I was anesthetized and when I woke up, they released me.”

Burtch said her boyfriend provided no financial support for the abortion, which at about $700, was an enormous amount for her.

“So basically, I just saved my pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters in order to get it,” she said.

Her relationship ended soon after, and until recently, Burtch had only shared her experience with her husband and a close friend.

Then the US Supreme Court threw out 50 years of precedent in 2022 and overturned Roe, taking away a constitutional right for all American women and tossing the question of abortion’s legality back to the states instead.

Since then, 21 states have instituted abortion bans or restrictions, including 14 states with total or near-total bans and some without exceptions except to save the life of the mother.

The loss of Roe and the push to protect reproductive rights in Nevada

When she heard that the court had overturned Roe, Burtch was horrified.

“I was just like, ‘oh my God, an earthquake has just happened.’”

Burtch decided to do something she had never planned to do before. She  wrote an email to her three children — including two daughters — revealing to them for the first time that she had an abortion at 20 years old.

“I had told myself that I would probably never tell my kids about my abortion, but I was just sitting in my car before [going to an abortion rights rally], and wrote this thing,” she said. “I got an amazing amount of support from my three kids.”

The court’s decision to overrule Roe also pushed Burtch to become a dedicated volunteer in a new effort seeking to guarantee abortion rights via an amendment to the Nevada state constitution.

She is one of hundreds of women and men who have joined Lindsey Harmon, the president of Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, and her team in successfully gathering more than double the number of required signatures—the state requires 102,362 signatures from registered Nevada voters, with 25,591 signatures received from each of the state’s four congressional districts—in order to  to place a ballot measure in front of voters.

The amendment would give Nevadans a guarantee of “a fundamental right to (an) abortion performed or administered by a qualified health care practitioner until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient, without interference from the state or its political subdivisions.”

The proposed language of the ballot measure also states that individuals or any health care provider “who acts consistent with the applicable scope and practice of providing reproductive health care services” cannot be penalized or prosecuted.

While Nevadans voted to codify abortion up to 24 weeks—when “fetal viability” occurs—in 1990, the new ballot question would ask voters whether they want that same protection to be included in the state constitution. The current protections can be changed with another referendum vote, but amending the state’s constitution would make it more difficult to pass abortion bans or restrictions in the future.

The Nevada Secretary of State’s office recently announced that the abortion ballot amendment had met all the requirements to appear on the Nevada ballot in November.

Now, if 51% of Nevadans who come to the polls in November vote ‘yes’ on the measure and then vote ‘yes’ again in the 2026 elections, abortion will be enshrined into the state’s Constitution.

A diverse coalition bands together to protect abortion rights

Harmon, who is also the Executive Director of Planned Parenthood Votes Nevada, knew after the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe in 2022 and former President Trump’s pattern of “appointing all these younger pro-life judges,” that it was “time to take action” to protect Nevadans.

While abortion is currently legal in Nevada, Harmon also said the effort would help “support our friends that live in neighboring Republican-led border states, Idaho and Utah and Arizona,” all of which have abortion bans.

The Nevadans For Reproductive Freedom organization was created with 22 reproductive health and community-led partner organizations banding together to try and enshrine the right to an abortion into Nevada’s Constitution. The groups have utilized both volunteers and hired team members to first gather signatures and then to inform and educate Nevadans about the ballot amendment.

“It’s been easy to gather signatures because people are mad about the Dobbs decision [overturning Roe] and they’re really excited to get an opportunity to not only sign petitions in the state and solidify it [the right to an abortion] in the state, but also to show the rest of the nation that Nevadans do not support abortion bans,” Harmon told The Nevadan.

The lifelong native of Reno said that there’s been a good mix of volunteers who gathered signatures and that surprisingly, a lot of the effort’s most committed volunteers are men.

“We call them Dobbs dads,” she said. “These are men who identify as fathers, who have children of reproductive age or have children who will be of reproductive age in this country, and they can’t imagine a world in which their daughters don’t have the same rights that their wives had or even that their mothers had.”

Harmon is also excited by the support for the ballot measure from “young folks,” who have just registered to vote for the first time, from Republicans, and from “folks who drive in from rural communities to sign our petition” at events.

“We had people driving for hours and hours to sign this thing.They were bringing their spouses and their children. It’s kind of like you see these mini community pods of people who came together and are like, ‘I can’t believe we have to do this, but I’m going to be here to support you,’” Harmon said.

For Burtch’s part, there was no question but that she would volunteer to support the ballot initiative.

She was never an activist growing up, she said, but she always considered herself a feminist.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, however, she joined the women’s rights organization, the National Organization for Women’s Nevada chapter. Nevada NOW endorses and supports state and local candidates.

The loss of Roe prompted Burtch to get more involved in the fight for reproductive rights, and she said gathering signatures was a mostly positive experience.

She found that older women, like herself, were “easy” to get as petition signers, but that some college students were harder to persuade.

“I don’t think they understand the consequences,” she said. “After decades of the complacency for Roe v. Wade, I think younger generations just don’t know what it was like before. I don’t think until they’re up against it, because it was like, ‘oh no, we’re safe here’ …and it’s like, no, it can change with any way the wind blows … it was a more challenging conversation.”

Looking ahead to November

Now that all the needed signatures are collected, Harmon is excited to embark on the next phase of the ballot initiative’s operation this month: going door-to-door and speaking directly to voters about it so they are fully aware of the abortion amendment that will be on their ballots in November.

“We’re doing immense voter education,” she said. “We’re going to be able to have a conversation about the ballot and then we’re going to be able to talk about other democracy issues since we’re there. It will be a really exciting election cycle.”

Harmon emphasized that the team will also be stressing to voters that in addition to voting for the abortion ballot amendment, they need to make “thoughtful choices” about candidates on the ballot in November.

“Because there is a real threat of a national abortion ban” if Donald Trump is elected president, she said.

She also pointed out that Sam Brown, the Republican running for a US Senate seat against Democratic incumbent Senator Jacky Rosen, describes himself as “pro-life” and has been associated with the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a strict anti-abortion group.

On the other hand, Rosen is a strong supporter of reproductive freedom.

Harmon also said that the coalition has a lot of Spanish language partners with Spanish-speaking organizers and volunteers and that reaching Latina voters will be a critical part of their campaign.

She believes that Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom will be successful in getting the 51% of the votes it needs to leap over its first hurdle in 2024. Then work will begin again to get the needed votes to succeed on the November 2026 ballot. Only then will the abortion amendment become part of the state Constitution.

“I want to be able to show the rest of the nation what it means to win in a battleground state that is predominantly Latino, that has a lot of young and new voters,” Harmon said. “And this is proof point to the other side to say, ‘you picked the wrong battle to have because you’re going to lose every time,’ and I’m going to keep fighting every day.”