Pro-choice advocates are working in multiple states to get abortion amendments on the ballot after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.- Ohio voters will vote on an amendment this fall that would make abortion legal up to birth if a physician determines it is necessary to protect the life of the mother, and activists in states like North Dakota, Oklahoma and Montana are in the early days of getting a draft amendment approved for a ballot vote.
- “The ballot measures put forward in states across the country are a coordinated effort on behalf of the abortion lobby to impose their extreme agenda on pro-life states,” Stephen Billy, vice president of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Pro-choice activists in several states are attempting to put abortion amendments on the ballot that could enshrine the practice into law.
Lawmakers in multiple states have passed laws banning abortion at various stages since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Pro-choice activists, however, are attempting to make headway to protect access in Ohio, Arizona, Nebraska, South Dakota and Florida by making abortion constitutionally protected.
Ohio’s proposed abortion amendment, which was introduced in February, would make the practice legal up to birth if a physician deems it necessary to protect the mother’s life, according to its text. GOP legislators introduced Issue 1 in May, which would have required proposed amendments to obtain a 60% threshold instead of just a simple majority, but it failedto pass during the Aug. 8 special election.
After the results in Ohio, Stephen Billy, vice president of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the pro-life movement is learning from past mistakes and is preparing to push back against these initiatives.
“We have learned many lessons from our defeat in these fights, but the main takeaway is that we must define the issues at stake early and often with a simple message,” Billy said. “So far, in all of the state battles, our side has failed to take this approach, allowing the left and pro-abortion industry and allies to define the effort.”
Arizona activists filed paperwork on the same day as Ohio’s special election for an amendment that would allow an abortion to be performed up until birth if a doctor deems it necessary to protect the physical or mental health of the mother.
The state banned abortion after 15 weeks, unless there is a medical emergency, following the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to the legislation. The law also made it a felony for a doctor to perform an abortion in the state.
Nebraska appeared to follow Arizona’s lead after the political campaign committee “Protect Our Rights” submitted paperwork for an amendment to protect access to abortion, despite state legislators passing a 12-week ban in May, according to the Nebraska Examiner. The committee is still working on drafting specific language for the amendment, but it would require 10% of the registered voters in the state along with 5% of the registered voters being from 38 of Nebraska’s 93 counties to get the measure put on the ballot.
Advocates in Florida have also been collecting signatures for an amendment, with organizers claiming in August that they had nearly half a million signees, according to NPR.
“As long as I have breath in my body, I’m going to continue to fight for freedom and liberation,” Trish Brown, who works with the grassroots organization Power Up People, told NPR. “I’m going to always continue to fight for being able to have control over my own body.”
Activists in South Dakota presented a proposal that would bar the state from creating restrictions on abortion before 13 weeks, and then would only allow some regulations, such as limiting abortions except in cases where the “physical health of the pregnant woman” is in danger, beyond 14 weeks, according to South Dakota News Watch. The measure is not supported by Planned Parenthood, which believes the measure is not far enough, according to The New York Times.
The amendments won’t make it onto this year’s ballots in the four states, but it could be a deciding issue for voters in 2024, according to the NYT. Several other states are still in the early stages of pushing abortion ballot initiatives; North Dakota, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Montana have made little official progress to get initiatives on the ballot.
“The ballot measures put forward in states across the country are a coordinated effort on behalf of the abortion lobby to impose their extreme agenda on pro-life states,” Billy told the DCNF. “We need political leaders and the movement to forcefully engage with these initiatives and we need to not only counter the deceitful messaging of liberal special interests but also the bias of the corporate media.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
