Kristin Gambardella and her husband are parents to a little boy. They were ecstatic last year when they found out they were expecting their second child, a girl. Genetic testing in the first trimester indicated the baby was healthy.
But Gambardella said further testing in the second trimester began to turn up a series of concerning anomalies.
“The doctors told us that our baby would live a short life full of pain and surgeries and constant medical care,” Gambardella said during a panel on abortion rights in Phoenix earlier this month. “I was in shock.”
The Tucson couple wanted this pregnancy, but after reviewing the diagnosis with multiple doctors, they decided an abortion would be the best option for their family.
Gambardella was almost halfway through the pregnancy — 18 weeks along. Arizona’s current law bans abortion after 15 weeks.
The couple made an appointment in Albuquerque and made a seven-hour drive for the procedure.
“Instead of spending the last few days of my pregnancy giving my baby girl love and grieving at home, we were tasked with all of the logistics of traveling out of state,” Gambardella said.
Arizona will be one of 10 states this election to vote on an abortion-related ballot measure. When Arizonans vote on Proposition 139, they will decide whether to enshrine broader abortion rights in the state constitution or to keep the state’s 15-week law in place.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, many states began enforcing total bans or bans at six weeks. Arizona that year enacted the 15-week law, which does permit many abortions. In 2021, the year before the Dobbs decision, about 94% of abortions in Arizona happened before 15 weeks of gestation, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. The law also makes exceptions for abortions later in pregnancy in medical emergencies.
But abortion rights advocates say Arizona’s current law still creates traumatic obstacles for women like Gambardella.
“I challenge the opposition to sit with those women and tell them that 15 weeks is enough. It certainly is not,” said Chris Love, a spokesperson for the Arizona for Abortion Access campaign. “We’re not willing to leave even one pregnant Arizonan behind.”
Proposition 139 would amend the state constitution to allow abortions to the point of fetal viability — around 24 weeks. And it would allow exceptions for abortions beyond 24 weeks to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.
“It actually expands abortion beyond viability for virtually any reason,” said Cindy Dahlgren, a spokesperson for the opposition to Proposition 139.
The opposition group calls themselves the It Goes Too Far campaign because they say the proposed abortion amendment is overly vague and dangerously broad. The group argues even regulations meant to ensure patient safety could be tossed out if the measure passes.
“Prop. 139 makes those critical safeguards impossible to enforce,” Dahlgren said. “There’s really no limitation that could stand underneath that language.”
Arizona has dozens of laws on the books regulating abortion. There’s a required 24-hour wait for patients, a law barring abortion medication through the mail, and a requirement that the patient have an ultrasound, which providers say is often medically unnecessary. Those laws are likely to be challenged in court if the measure passes.
“There will be a lot of litigation trying to figure out exactly what it means,” said Barbara Atwood, professor of law emerita at the University of Arizona. “There will be a period of some uncertainty about which of the existing laws – on informed consent, waiting periods, the 15-week law itself – whether those will stand under the new constitutional provision if it passes.”
But Love said Proposition 139 would do nothing to impact safety regulations that are standard across all medical fields.
“There’s state licensure requirements and medical ethics requirements that will remain exactly the same once Prop. 139 passes,” Love said. “What we’re doing is trying to restore the law to back where it was before the Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade. There’s nothing tricky about it.”
The Proposition 139 campaign argues the real threat to women’s safety comes when abortion is too regulated, and doctors may hesitate to provide timely care in emergencies.
In recent high-profile cases out of Texas and Georgia, for example, women having miscarriages or pregnancy-related emergencies have faced severe complications or even death as doctors delayed care as a result of strict abortion laws.
The It Goes Too Far campaign points out Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has said doctors in Arizona do not have to wait to intervene in these kinds of cases.
In one It Goes Too Far campaign video, an Arizona woman named Lydia describes her own devastating pregnancy loss.
“At my 12-week appointment, there was no heartbeat,” she says. But, she goes on to say she faced no barriers to receiving the surgical procedure she needed to remove the fetus. “The fact is, women do deserve comprehensive and safe miscarriage treatment and we already have it.”
The Arizona for Abortion Access campaign gathered more than 800,000 signatures from voters across the state to put Proposition 139 on the ballot. And the campaign has raised more than $32 million — about 25 times more than its opposition. Multiple polls have shown the measure is likely to pass, as similar measures have in other states since the Dobbs decision.
But a May poll from Noble Predictive Insights showed that while most Arizonans want abortion to be legal, about half of the state’s voters say they want it to be permitted only in some circumstances. And most who said that said they would put restrictions at 15 weeks or earlier.
Dahlgren said Arizona’s current law is in line with what voters really want.
“The law in Arizona has been settled, abortion is legal up to 15 weeks, beyond that for any medical emergencies, and we have these common-sense safety precautions in place,” Dahlgren said.
Even so, about 3,000 women are estimated to have traveled out of Arizona for abortions in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which researches abortion policy.
Gambardella would never have expected to be one of them.
“I never thought, or at least I really hoped, I wouldn’t have to make the decision to have an abortion or that these bans might affect my family,” Gambardella said.
But she wasn’t miscarrying, her life was not at risk, and the test results that revealed her baby’s bleak diagnosis didn’t arrive until after 15 weeks. When she came face-to-face with Arizona’s time limit on abortions in her doctor’s office, she said it felt cruel and arbitrary.
“I was beyond devastated but also angry,” Gambardella said.
On the long drive home from New Mexico after ending her pregnancy, Gambardella said her husband brought up an uncomfortable question.
“My husband said, ‘What are we going to tell our friends, is it going to be that we lost our baby, or are we going to tell them?’” Gambardella said.
She replied that she wanted to tell everyone she had an abortion but that she had to leave Arizona to get it.