The Abortion Haven in the Mountain West

What if I told you there’s an island of abortion rights in the Mountain West, born of a state constitution so forward-looking that it started out by enshrining abortion rights a full year before the US Supreme Court’s landmark abortion decision Roe V. Wade in 1973?

Hey from Montana, a strange, gigantic state that people have all kinds of ideas about. When I travel, which is often, telling someone I’m from Montana typically elicits one of two responses: The first is, “Oh, Trump Country!” I’ve had this one blurted at me from Mongolia to Michigan, no matter that Montana barely has a million people and almost no say in presidential electoral politics. The second tends along the lines of, “Oh I’m obsessed with Montana and I want to move there/vacation there/buy a fourth home there.” Okay.

What I’ve never heard in response is anything about the strange political nuances of this place, or its wild history.  Yes, my home state is admittedly, somewhat recently, deep “red,” with uber-conservative Republicans winning election to nearly every major office this year. But what’s also true is that with the fall of Roe in 2022, Montana has become a regional haven for abortion rights. Across much of the Mountain West, abortion rights are under attack and driving a wider loss of health-care options. Idaho in particular has enacted some of the most extreme anti-abortion laws in the country, driving out its own doctors and forcing its own residents to cross state lines for essential health care. 

But while anti-abortion Republicans swept political offices in Montana again this year, voters also overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment—one of eight states across the country seeking to protect abortion rights—further strengthening the power of pregnant people to make their own health-care decisions without political meddling. Fifty-eight percent of Montana voters supported the measure, the same percentage that voted for Donald Trump as president.

It’s a puzzle how voters can elect candidates who work to overturn essential human rights, while voting for a measure to protect this one specific right. Montana clings to its identity as a place that, until recently, had made a big deal of living by the ethos of “do whatever the fuck you want, as long as it’s not harming someone else.” This spirit has been challenged repeatedly since the GOP took super-majority power in the state just a few years ago, leading to vicious attacks on trans Montanans, women, public education, and those seen as threats to the notion of a white, Christian cowboy landscape . But if you go back 50-plus years, things were very different in Montana. Labor unions held immense political power, as grassroots feminists and champions of citizen’s rights and environmental protection helped to write the state’s remarkably progressive constitution. Today those deep progressive political roots are proving stubborn and hard to plow under. 

In 1972, the League of Women Voters led a group writing a new state constitution.  They agreed that privacy deserved a prime spot in the governing document, and as a result, article 2, section 10 of the Montana constitution reads, “The right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest.”

There was never much mystery that the section was intended to protect the right to abortion as a medical decision. By setting down the “leave me alone” ethos in the constitution, Montana set itself apart. 

When the US Supreme Court two years ago ended Roe’s protections and set back human rights for women by decades, states across this region fell under immediate trigger laws—legislation established to ban abortion as soon as the high court made such a decision. Nowhere imposed more restrictive laws than Idaho, from attempting to hold doctors criminally liable for abortion services, to outright banning abortion at all stages of pregnancy. The result has been a mass outward departure from the state by doctors, especially OB-GYNs, and families who don’t want to raise children under laws that harken back to darker, even more dangerous times for women.

Today, with the far-right-wing in charge of the state, attacks on abortion rights have quickened and been repeatedly struck down by state courts, leaning on those five-decade-old constitutional protections. Yes, Republicans took control of every statewide elected office, but they did so in part by concealing and obfuscating their plans to ban abortion, ignore the state constitution, and systematically attack the judicial branch that has stood in the way of unconstitutional abortion bans. And yet we again preserved the right to abortion, approved even in deep red counties.

Maybe the old “leave us alone” ethos isn’t dead after all. Maybe it’s still lurking under the wave of disinformation and national political identity that has washed over us..

So when you look to red states, red counties, red regions, consider this. We have complex political histories and the Trump-era attacks on civil liberties that are washing over us now just might not be strong enough to erase where we came from.

The women of Montana who fought to have our medical privacy protected decades ago likely saw this moment coming. Political extremism and disinformation are eroding our history and our rights, but our backbone isn’t yet broken.