Kentucky voters rejected a constitutional amendment on Tuesday that would have plainly stated that residents do not have a right to an abortion.
Fifty-three percent of Kentucky voters opted against Constitutional Amendment 2, which stated that Kentuckians had no right to an abortion and would have prohibited the use of state funding to subsidize the procedure.
But the failure of the constitutional amendment doesn’t mean abortion is legal without limits in the state. Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade earlier this year, a trigger law took effect in Kentucky confining abortion access in the state to cases in which the mother’s life is threatened. That law remains in effect.
An ongoing lawsuit is still pending over whether the make abortion a right for women across the state.
The failure of Constitutional Amendment 2 was hailed by Kentucky’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The majority of Kentuckians made one thing clear: abortion is our right and politicians have no place in our private medical decisions,” the group tweeted following the news.
Elizabeth Nash, an analyst from the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, echoed these sentiments. “Abortion is a winning issue…Voters want people to have bodily autonomy and agency over their lives. That is pretty core to being an American,” Nash told the BBC.
Voters in Vermont, Michigan, and California passed measures to protect abortion access in their state constitutions on Tuesday.
In Vermont on Tuesday night, over three-quarters of voters supported enshrining abortion access into the state’s constitution.
The state’s ACLU executive director James Lyall similarly applauded the news as a “historic victory for everyone who values reproductive liberty, bodily autonomy, and the right to access abortion care…It is a momentous occasion for Vermont, and for the nationwide movement for reproductive liberty.”
However, not everything broke the pro-choice way in Kentucky Tuesday night. Incumbent Republican senator Rand Paul comfortably won his re-election campaign last night.
Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican, describes himself as “100% pro-life” on his website.