Republican Lawmakers Struggle to Find Footing After Passage of Abortion Rights Amendment
Abortion restrictions have faced strong headwinds in the 2025 Legislature, as have supportive proposals for pregnant patients
By Mara Silvers for Montana Free Press
During the first half of the 2025 Legislature, there weren’t many debates on bills to restrict abortion access — a notable departure from the past two sessions steered by a Republican majority and the administration of Governor Greg Gianforte. But during the few committee hearings on the topic this year, frustration from opponents, whose numbers far outstripped supporters, quickly boiled over.
In a February hearing about a bill that aimed to prevent abortion “trafficking” for procedures deemed illegal, Bozeman resident Kaylee Ackerman criticized the bill for raising an issue she said Montanans have repeatedly tried to settle.
“Abortion is legal in Montana and we value our reproductive rights. Time after time, Montanans have stood up for abortion access and shown that access to care is a right and one we won’t back down from,” Ackerman said.
She and others made repeated reference to the November passage of Constitutional Initiative 128, which adds explicit protections for abortion rights in the state Constitution. Voters approved the amendment by a 16 percentage point margin.
In another hearing for a Republican-sponsored bill aiming to redefine personhood as beginning at conception, one of the opponents began listing how many people supported CI-128 in legislative districts that GOP candidates easily carried.
“Representative Overstreet, 51.87% of your district supported CI-128,” said Keegan Nashan, a Livingston resident who told lawmakers she volunteered in support of the initiative. “Representative Jedidiah Hinkle, 55.26% of your district voted in favor.”
Several of the bills that sparked strong opposition from abortion rights advocates died in committee or failed to clear a vote before the full chamber in which they originated. The personhood bill, which would put another constitutional amendment before voters in 2026, passed out of committee in early February but has not been brought to the House floor for debate.
For the Republican lawmakers and lobbyists who have long tried to curb abortion in Montana, often operating from their own Christian and Catholic worldviews, the 2025 session has been disappointing. But some say the new landscape also represents a worthy challenge: How to advance a longstanding political and moral agenda when support for abortion rights reigns supreme.
“I call it ‘spiked.’ We get spiked by people,” said Representative Kerri Seekins-Crowe, R-Billings, the sponsor of two abortion restriction bills that the House Judiciary Committee tabled earlier this session. Seekins-Crowe supported the move after back-to-back days of tense hearings, during which she said the intent of the bills was overshadowed by zealous defenders of reproductive rights.
Even with CI-128 in place, Seekins-Crowe said she wants to keep advocating for restrictions on abortion, including those later in pregnancy. She also supports pushing for higher regulatory standards for clinics that provide abortions and trying to prevent Montana from becoming an “abortion tourism” destination for people traveling from more restrictive states.
“You have to just stay focused on what the real conversation is,” Seekins-Crowe said in a February interview. “We need to have those big conversations.”
Polling recently conducted by Montana Free Press and Rutgers University’s Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling reiterated Montanan’s general support for abortion rights. Sixty-two percent of Montanans polled said they support abortion being legal in all or most circumstances.
But that stance had marked variation based on partisan alignment, with 34% of Republicans saying they support legal abortion in most cases compared to 90% percent of Democrats. Sixty-eight percent of independent respondents endorsed that position.
Republican efforts to restrict abortion access have also faced pitfalls in the state judiciary system. Earlier this month, a state district court judge struck down a handful of Republican-backed laws from 2023 as unconstitutional on privacy and equal protection grounds, continuing a theme for GOP laws signed by Gianforte since 2021. Similar measures had previously been routinely vetoed by Democratic governors.
The laws attempted to prohibit or regulate various types of abortion procedures and restrict Medicaid funding unless an abortion is deemed “medically necessary.” In separate rulings, Helena Judge Mike Menahan found that state attorneys representing the Legislature and Gianforte had fallen short of proving that the state had a compelling interest, based on bona fide medical risks, to restrict Montanans’ fundamental constitutional rights.
Those rulings are based on the state’s existing constitutional protections. The higher standards created by CI-128 are scheduled to take effect this summer.
Alongside House Republicans navigating the current legislative session, Senate GOP lawmakers have struggled with the changed tenor around the abortion rights debate. A bill that would have restricted medication abortions in the name of keeping specific pharmaceutical byproducts out of wastewater, Senate Bill 479, died on the Senate floor after a heated debate about the bill’s potential impact in the Legislature’s 11th hour before transmittal break.
The legislation’s sponsor, Senator Theresa Manzella, R-Hamilton, argued that the bill would not bar women from receiving medications used for managing miscarriages or terminating pregnancies. Rather, she said, the measure would balance Montana’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment with CI-128’s passage.
“This bill does not prohibit abortions. This bill simply ensures that when abortions are conducted at home, that the toxic and dangerous results of the chemical abortion are not dumped into our drinking water,” Manzella said, advancing an argument that national environmental experts and toxicologists have said is unfounded.
During the Senate floor debate, Democrats sought to cast Manzella’s proposal as a Trojan horse meant to stigmatize patients who take abortion medications and doctors who prescribe them. Opponents specifically focused on the bill’s requirement that a patient use a “catch kit” and medical waste bag to dispose of fetal tissue.
“I want everybody to imagine that in your head, OK? I’m saying this as graphic as I can because you need to imagine a woman or a girl having to squat over a catch kit. This is gruesome. This is cruel. Is this how we treat the women that we hope will reproduce and have your babies? It’s unreal,” said Senator Cora Neumann, D-Bozeman.
“This state has overwhelmingly voted to leave women alone, allow them their privacy, allow them control over their own bodies,” Neumann continued. The bill, she argued, is “not about the environment. It’s not about water. It is about trying to stop abortion and it is about trying to control women’s bodies.”
A handful of Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in opposing the bill, causing it to fail on a 25-25 tie vote.
In a March interview, Neumann said that GOP lawmakers have seemed receptive to considering the effects of abortion policies and implications for medical privacy. Even still, many Republicans remain torn between upholding the party’s traditional anti-abortion stance while respecting the new constitutional amendment.
At a House Judiciary Committee meeting in late February, a Republican representative reflected on that conflict when speaking in favor of tabling House Bill 609, the bill related to abortion trafficking.
“I’m against abortion. I think abortion as birth control is very much a crime, I don’t think that’s what we should be doing. But there is a reality of the fact that CI-128 passed,” said Representative Tracy Sharp, R-Polson. The uncertainty about how CI-128 will be applied and interpreted by the courts, he continued, made him “really uncomfortable” with some of the abortion bills that the committee had considered. “I think we have to put a lot more forethought into some of these bills.”
On the Senate side, Neumann said that explicit testimony from her and other Democratic lawmakers seemed to sway Republicans during the debate on SB 479.
“I think that was why we killed that bill,” Neumann said, adding that opponents were not sure they had enough votes when the floor session began that day. “We changed minds on the floor, 100%.”
While some abortion restrictions have struggled to pass out of committee or legislative chambers, other bills to expand services for pregnant patients have also received mixed responses from many Republican lawmakers.
A Democratic-sponsored proposal to require private insurers to cover in vitro fertilization services for Montana families failed on a 47-52 vote in the House chamber, after emotional and passionate disagreements between lawmakers. A Republican-backed bill to allow child support payments during pregnancy did not advance out of committee.
In the Senate, legislation to certify doulas and create a framework for their services to be reimbursed through Montana Medicaid failed to pass out of a Republican-majority health committee in February. But a later effort by Neumann, the bill’s sponsor, to blast the bill to the Senate floor received bipartisan support.
The legislation’s debate also sparked fierce disagreements among Republicans. Some endorsed the strategy as a way to help low-income patients who are at high risk of experiencing pregnancy complications, post-partum depression and other mental health issues. Others staunchly opposed allowing the doula services to be covered by Medicaid, railing against the expansion of social welfare programs even as they applauded the role of doulas generally.
“At some point there’s a line,” said Senator Dennis Lenz, R-Billings. “We feel bad for the woman who was in postpartum depression … Things are broken but this isn’t gonna solve that.”
The bill passed an initial vote by the full floor, 32-18, and was referred to the Senate finance committee for further review.
Neumann expressed relief about SB 479 and other bills failing to advance in the first half of the session. But she told Montana Free Press that the vocal opposition to the doula bill shows how lawmakers continue to disagree about the best ways to support pregnant women and struggling families.
“To me, this is basically a room of old white men. And you’re legislating on women of reproductive age,” she said. Referring to male lawmakers who opposed the doula legislation, she added, “None of you have had babies. You’re trying to force us to have babies without any regard for our health and wellbeing. And you have no problem standing up and pontificating on that.”
Perhaps Republican lawmakers can stop being obsessed with forcing women to give birth, and work on issues of real importance to Montanans?