"We're looking to skip that part."

— Mark Gurley, a spokesman for the Michigan Heartbeat Coalition, explaining to Michigan Radio' how his group hopes to enact a citizen initiative banning most abortions without voters' approval.

Would Michigan voters support an initiative to outlaw or restrict abortion?

Election results and polling data suggest powerfully that the answer is no.

In Michigan as in most other populous states, voters are consistently more likely to identify themselves as pro-choice than as pro-life. In the most recent statewide election, candidates who pledged to oppose new restrictions on reproductive freedom swept the top four races on the ballot.

No one who had been paying even a little attention could have been surprised when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer pledged to veto two GOP-sponsored bills that would have outlawed the most common procedure used to perform late-term abortions. And not even the most ardent opponents of abortion think an effort to recall Whitmer over those vetoes would succeed.

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Yet there is a good chance that before the current year ends, Michigan lawmakers — for the fifth time in the post-Roe v. Wade era — will adopt new abortion restrictions that lack the support of either the electorate or the popularly elected governor.

If history is a guide, rules subjecting women and their physicians to criminal penalties for abortions late in pregnancy will become law with the support of just 400,000 Michigan voters — less than 6% of the number registered to vote in the state, or about one-fifth the number that cast their ballots for the losing candidate in last November's gubernatorial election. A second ballot initiative aims to ban after about six weeks of pregnancy.

The mechanism by which such a tiny minority of Michigan voters is poised to inflict its will has been part of the state's constitution for more than a century. But it is only in recent decades that opponents of abortion have exploited it to thwart the electoral majority's druthers on an issue of major public importance.

A populist idea

Michigan was among the first states in the nation to provide its citizens with a means of enacting legislation or amending the constitution even when their elected representatives balked. Under the state constitution's provisions for such citizen-initiated initiatives, any grass-roots group can propose a new law for the voters' approval by gathering signatures from just 8% of the number of registered voters who participated in the most recent election for governor.

About 4.25 million voters cast ballots in Michigan's 2018 gubernatorial contest, which means a group that seeks to put a ballot initiative before voters in the 2020 election needs to collect signatures from about 340,000 voters.

But Right to Life of Michigan, the state's leading anti-abortion lobbying organization, has discovered a way to enact new restrictions on abortion even when rank-and-file voters oppose them.

The secret is a constitutional provision that requires state legislators to vote on any anti-abortion initiative that garners the minimum number of signatures before voters get a chance to weigh in, and also exempts the initiative from a gubernatorial veto.

If they can neutralize Whitmer, abortion opponents say, they have a good chance of enacting new restrictions — perhaps even a so-called "heartbeat" bill that would effectively ban the procedure after the sixth week of pregnancy, or before many women even know they are pregnant — without submitting it to a vote of the people or securing the vote of a single Democratic legislator.

Right to Life launched its petition campaign for a citizen initiative similar to the legislation Whitmer has promised to veto last week. As in the past, it will partner with Catholic parishes throughout the state to collect signatures of support.

A record of success

If the campaign succeeds, it will be the fourth time abortion opponents have circumvented a governor’s veto without winning a popular vote. RTL used the petition mechanism to enact laws banning Medicaid-funded abortions (1987) and requiring parental consent (1990) over of the objection of Democratic Gov. James Blanchard; a ban on dilation and extraction abortions vetoed by Democrat Jennifer Granholm in 2004, and new restrictions on private insurance coverage vetoed by Granholm's Republican successor, Rick Snyder.

"We are the experts in this state with regard to citizen-initiated legislation," boasts Genevieve Marnon, Right to Life of Michigan's legislative director. She predicts RTL will have little difficulty collecting 400,000 signatures within the six-month window mandated by Michigan law, clearing the way for a veto-proof vote by early next year..

Another anti-abortion group, the Michigan Heartbeat Coalition, is waging a separate initiative campaign to ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Like RTL, the coalition hopes GOP legislators will prevent voters from weighing in on its proposal by adopting the heartbeat ban preemptively, once the requisite petition signatures are secured.

"We don’t need to make this a circus and a parade," Heartbeat Coalition spokesman Mark Gurley told Michigan Radio last week. "I think the 2020 elections will be heated enough with the presidential election cycle.”

In theory, the requirement to secure legislative approval should preclude the adoption of legislation if most voters oppose it. But the redistricting scheme Republicans adopted after the 2010 census protects the Republican legislative majority Right to Life depends on to do its bidding even when most voters cast their ballots for pro-choice Democrats. A federal court panel ruled earlier this year that Michigan's current legislative boundaries illegally dilute the impact of Democratic voters, but it'll be at least 2020 before new boundaries are in place.

Redistricting schemes that marginalize millions of voters and ballot initiatives that become law over the objections of a majority both have a corrosive effect on voters' confidence in their government. RTL's latest end run represents a threat not just to the rights of pregnant women, but to the principle of majority rule.

Brian Dickerson is the Free Press' editorial page editor. Reach him at bdickerson@freepress.com.