It’s impossible to sugarcoat it,” Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America wrote in a memo issued on November 3. The 2026 midterm election results “are a disaster for the unborn, for their mothers, and for the country as a whole. Democrats are on track to control two of the three pieces they need to legalize taxpayer-funded abortion on demand, up until birth, in all fifty states—something they promise to start pushing as soon as they take office in January.”
She’s right. The blue tsunami that swept the country on Tuesday shocked even pessimistic conservatives, handing the Democratic Party the House, the Senate, and a springboard to 2028. Outgoing Florida governor Ron DeSantis noted that even if Republicans manage to win the presidency in 2028, it will be impossible to confirm “worthy successors” to Justices Alito and Thomas until 2033.
In Virginia, Question 1, a constitutional amendment on abortion, passed with 62.4 percent of the vote, protecting abortion in the first two trimesters with broad exceptions in the third trimester that amount to legal feticide until birth. Question 1 will not change the status quo much—Virginia already had a very permissive abortion regime—but as Ed Whelan explained, it also enables minors to obtain cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers without parental consent.
In April, the Founding Freedoms Law Center (FFLC), the legal arm of The Family Foundation in Virginia, filed suit asking a Virginia court to find that Question 1 “violates the Virginia Constitution because the question put to voters is materially misleading.” The FFLC is also seeking a permanent injunction barring enforcement of the amendment. That effort is ongoing.
In Nevada, voters approved the Right to Abortion Initiative (Question 6) with 63.4 percent of the vote. This will amend Nevada’s constitution to protect abortion until viability and afterward if a healthcare professional deems it necessary. Abortion is now legal until birth in the Silver State. Conversely, Missouri’s Amendment 3, which would have repealed the 2024 constitutional amendment protecting abortion and banned sex-change surgeries for minors, failed with 44.5 percent of the vote.
It is not all bad news. Idaho voters rejected the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act (Proposition 1), a ballot initiative that would have legalized abortion until birth, barred lawmakers from legislating protections for unborn children, and nullified Idaho’s pro-life laws. The proposition needed a simple majority to pass, but 56 percent of voters opposed it. The Defense of Life Act, which took effect on August 25, 2022, remains in place. Idaho voters chose pro-life laws that ban abortion in almost all cases.
