Press Release
On Opening Day of Legislative Session, Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona Warns Lawmakers: Voters Chose Abortion Rights—And We Will Defend Them
Phoenix, AZ — As Arizona’s 57th legislative session begins today, Republican lawmakers are already ignoring the will of the people to push an extreme anti-abortion agenda. Republicans have prefiled HB2043—a bill based in dangerous ideology that grants legal rights to fetuses, laying the groundwork to restrict IVF, contraception, and more—underscoring their refusal to accept that Arizonans have decisively rejected these attacks.
In 2024, Arizonans overwhelmingly passed the Arizona Abortion Access Act (Prop 139), enshrining the state constitutional right to abortion and sending a clear message: politicians should stay out of personal health care decisions. Yet instead of focusing on lowering costs, strengthening health care, or addressing the real challenges facing hardworking families across the state, anti-abortion lawmakers are doubling down on the same unpopular crusade voters have already rebuffed.
Reproductive Freedom for All Director of Arizona Campaigns Athena Salman released the following statement:
“Arizonans were clear at the ballot box: we support abortion access and we reject political interference in our health care. Yet, anti-abortion extremists in the legislature are fixated on overriding the will of their constituents, attacking our fundamental freedoms, and undermining Prop 139. They made it clear they care more about their own extreme agenda than doing anything to improve access to affordable health care.
Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona will fiercely oppose every attempt to roll back our rights or drag our state backward. We look forward to working alongside Gov. Katie Hobbs, our champions in the legislature, and our partners across the state to protect abortion access and reproductive freedom for all Arizonans.”
Last legislative session, Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona organizers helped stop Republicans’ efforts to gut state funding to AHCCCS—Arizona’s medicaid program, which covers half of all births in the state—and successfully blocked every anti-abortion bill from becoming law.
This year, Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona is working alongside champion legislators to pass bills that will:
- Establish the right to contraception
- Expand access to fertility treatments like IVF
- Repeal medically unnecessary abortion reporting requirements and waiting periods that delay or deny care
- Safeguard telemedicine and the mailing of abortion medication
- A budget that supports access to reproductive healthcare
While Republicans fixate on reproductive health care, they have also created a looming budget crisis by divesting significant state funds. Those divestments, combined with over a billion in cuts to state funding from Trump’s budget bill, will leave the legislature locked in a fiscal fight to try to make up the deficit instead of delivering real solutions for Arizonans.
Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona will continue building power across the state to protect abortion access and our hard-won freedoms, ensure that lawmakers who defy public will are held accountable, and, come November, secure a reproductive freedom majority in the legislature.
###
For over 55 years, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) has fought to protect and advance reproductive freedom at the federal and state levels—including access to abortion care, birth control, pregnancy and post-partum care, and paid family leave—for everybody. Reproductive Freedom for All is powered by its more than 4 million members from every state and congressional district in the country, representing the 8 in 10 Americans who support legal abortion.