Nevada Referendums – Peace and Life Referendums

Three Ballot Measures in 2024

1. Question 4, Remove Slavery as Punishment for Crime

2. Question 2, Revising Language Related to Public Entities for Individuals with Mental Illness, Blindness, or Deafness

3. Not yet on ballot, Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment

For the full list of referendums we’re tracking, see our home page.

Nevada Referendums Peace Pro-Life

On Ballot: November 5, 2024

Current status: Legislatively-referred amendment

See Ballotpedia page for information and updates.

For information on the states that have already passed this and states that still need to, see our topic page: Finally Abolishing All Slavery.

Finally Abolishing All

Legally Allowed Slavery

There’s been a long-standing tradition of pro-lifers comparing abortion to the way slavery was practiced in the United States, on the grounds that both require dehumanizing. The dehumanization is so extreme that killing human beings – unborn children and enslaved people — is legally allowed. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in both Roe v. Wade and in the Dred Scott decisions that certain classes of human beings were outside legal protection.

While abortion defenders object to the analogy, they do so by defending abortion, not by defending slavery. Naturally – they share the understanding that holding people in slavery is appalling. Nowadays, that’s the common attitude in the United States.

People generally understand that the 13^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery. Several state constitutions, drafted in the years soon thereafter, did the same. These were well after the principle was established nationally. They simply added such a provision to the state constitution.

But neither the nation nor many of these states abolished slavery entirely. They had an exception: people duly convicted of a crime.

The immediate impact in the U.S. was that slavery was able to continue. African Americans would be arrested for “vagrancy,” which means essentially being arrested for being unemployed. If that’s the “crime” that got a person into prison, and someone in prison could be enslaved, then slavery hadn’t really ended.

More recently, the use of cheap prison labor for manufactured goods used by government and nonprofits has meant that prisoners are slaves. In some states, they’re paid nothing; in most states, they get a few cents per hour, and the highest is $2 an hour.

There was a prisoners’ strike against these conditions in 2018, and another one in 2022, where the slavery exception is one of the things in contention.

While their lives are legally protected, they’re still being exploited. The working conditions can include physical harm and even avoidable deaths. Such is the nature of treating people as slaves. People in prison should be treated as people in prison.

Kinds of harm are all connected when dehumanizing is done. If prisoners must do involuntary servitude, they have little pay for themselves, and no pay to send their families. They haven’t always developed the kind of working skills that will help them get employment once out of prison.

Anything that harms families this way will harm a spirit of welcoming new members to the family. That is, these conditions increase the danger of abortions being done in an atmosphere where they’re so readily available.

On Ballot: November 5, 2024

Current status: Legislatively-referred amendment

See Ballotpedia page for information and updates.

In the state constitution, Article 13, Section 1 currently describes “institutions for the benefit of the insane, blind and deaf and dumb.” The word institutions would be replaced with entities under this amendment, and the insane, blind, deaf and dumb would be replaced with persons with significant mental illness, persons who are blind or visually impaired, persons who are deaf or hard of hearing and persons with intellectual disabilities or developmental disabilities.

Remarks by sponsor State Sen. Robin Titus, M.D. Excerpt: “I am aware that when the Nevada Constitution was written, different terminologies were used to describe persons with disabilities or a mental illness. However, more than 156 years after Nevada was admitted into the Union, it is time to give these words a more critical look. We should change them to contemporary language that is not deemed to be discriminatory or narrow.”

Hoped for Ballot: November 5, 2024

Current status: Collecting signatures. Due date: June 26, 2024.

See Ballotpedia page for information and updates.

Full text

See our topic page on Abortion in State Constitutions for information on what’s happening in other states.

This was originally listed as a legislatively-referred amendment, but the rules require passing also in the next session, requiring the vote to wait until 2026. A petition drive is occurring to speed this up. This was filed with the Secretary of State September 14, 2023.

If the petition drive is successful and it goes on the 2024 ballot, it will have to go on to the 2026 ballot as well and pass again. Nevada law requires that any constitutional amendment pass twice.

See:

Las Vegas hospital sued after woman dies from ‘septic abortion’ in 2022 (yahoo.com) by Greg Haas, KLAS, CBS Channel 8, September 22, 2023

Abortion isn’t Freedom

Setting aside the violence (and therefore lack of equal protection) done to unborn children, a point which proponents of this measure steadfastly ignore, the rhetoric they use about women also steadfastly ignores harm done. Here are some of the Consistent Life Network’s blog posts that explain this. They can offer good ideas for opponents of this measure to use in their work:

The Myth of Sexual Autonomy

Abortion and Violence Against Pregnant Women

How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture

The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook

Abortion Facilitates Sex Abuse: Documentation

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