Gwendolyn Chilcote tried to make it hard for patrons entering a bar in uptown Butte to miss her. On a Tuesday in mid-May, she wore a pink sweatshirt, smiled brightly and didn’t hesitate to make eye contact. Before they passed her table, she used one question to snag as many people as possible.
“Have you signed the petition for reproductive rights yet?”
Two of the incoming pub-goers were bearded men in hoodies and baseball hats who looked to be in their early 30s. They hadn’t signed the petition supporting Constitutional Initiative-128 and doubled back to hear more.
Chilcote, who volunteers with the local reproductive rights group Butte Action Alliance, gave them her intentionally crafted spiel. Signing the petition supports putting CI-128 on the ballot, she said, and if the campaign gathers more than 60,000 signatures, voters in November will be able to choose whether to keep pregnancy decisions in Montana between a woman and her doctor.
The men, both registered voters, nodded and jotted down their names. Chilcote kept a close eye on their progress. One mistaken date or illegible address would make the signature worthless. When they walked away, she leaned back and briefly relaxed. Two down, thousands more to go.
The last week of May marked about eight weeks of CI-128’s signature-gathering campaign and about three weeks until the sponsoring group Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, or MSRR, must submit verified signatures to local election administrators. If that effort is successful, Montanans will have the chance to vote “yes” or “no” on the explicit constitutional abortion protection in the fall.
Supporters and opponents of CI-128 acknowledge that getting the initiative on the ballot is not a sure thing. A multi-month court battle between MSRR and Montana’s Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen pushed back signature gathering by several weeks, much to the frustration of CI-128 advocates and the relief of anti-abortion groups.
And, even as MSRR touts a wave of volunteer interest, the group’s strategy for gathering signatures has been intentionally cautious. Organizers have avoided holding large public events or publicly posting the addresses of campaign offices out of fear of harassment and violence from anti-abortion advocates. Instead, MSRR has opted to send volunteers and paid staff from the firm Landslide Political out to pound the pavement, knock on doors and circulate clipboards among their friends and family.
MSRR declined to say how many signatures it has collected so far. A spokesperson for the Montana Secretary of State’s Office said that, as of May 29, MSRR has not submitted any of the 60,359 required signatures.
Opponents are organizing, too. In recent weeks, a political committee called the Montana Life Defense Fund has ramped up alternate messaging about CI-128, claiming it would usher in an era of limitless abortion and lead to a series of negative consequences. As the June 21 deadline approaches, the group is training its own volunteers to deter petitioners and, when sheets of signatures are submitted, to weed out ineligible names turned in to election officials.
The tension around CI-128 underscores Montana’s evolving landscape for abortion rights. Access remains legal and mostly unencumbered in the state while a plethora of Republican-backed prohibitions are blocked in court. Supporters of CI-128 say enshrining protections in the state Constitution is essential given those recent efforts and since the end of Roe v. Wade. For opponents, CI-128 represents an existential threat to the anti-abortion cause in Montana — a bulwark that, once built, would be exceedingly difficult to overcome.
