What role will reproductive rights play in the 2026 election?

Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro, now running for Nevada attorney general, speaks outside the Legislative Building in 2023 before a hearing on a ballot measure to enshrine the right to an abortion into the Nevada Constitution. (Photo courtesy NReal Media Strategies)

One advocacy group is jumping into Nevada’s 2026 endorsement cycle early with the hope of reversing the battleground state’s recent swing toward electing candidates with weaker records on protecting reproductive rights.

Abortion was seen as a key issue in the 2022 midterm elections, which took place months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade and largely brought wins for Democrats. Many expected the issue to be a deciding factor for voters in 2024, but Donald Trump’s ascent into a second presidential term, and Republicans taking control of both the House and Senate, raised doubts about that narrative.

“We learned the hard way in 2024,” said Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO Mini Timmaraju, in an interview with the Nevada Current, conceding there were voters they took for granted.

Reproductive Freedom for All exit polls and focus groups held in the aftermath of last year’s election found that many voters simply did not believe Trump would actually attempt to ban or restrict abortion. Democrats in the lead up to the election had flagged this “Trump believability gap” as a problem on myriad issues.

Their research also found that Trump did better among voters who were not familiar with his positions on abortion.

“When Trump said he was going to ‘leave it to the states,’ it gave a permission structure for voters who were conflicted,” Timmaraju said.

She added, “I will give him and his campaign credit for successfully inoculating Democrats at the presidential level by continually showing message discipline.”

Voters could feel empowered to vote for Trump while also supporting abortion rights protections, like those proposed in Nevada’s Question 6, because they saw abortion as something out of the purview of a president, or as protected at the state level, or as something Congress would never rally the votes for.

Timmaraju sees it as voters being swayed by misinformation because the actions taken by the Trump administration since he took office should make it clear that the issue isn’t being left to the states. But voters need to hear the message.

“We have to get in front of them, and we have to know our candidate early, and get them to understand the policy landscape,” she said. “They’re with us, but that takes a lot of repetition. That means it takes a lot more time, more than ever before, more than it did even two years ago, to break through to voters.”

Gov. Joe Lombardo, like many Republican candidates in Nevada, struggled with the issue of abortion rights while on the campaign trail in 2022, giving conflicting messages and defaulting to a position of sidestepping the issue by calling abortion rights “settled” in the state.

It’s an argument Timmaraju thinks voters should reject next year when he is up for reelection.

“I don’t know Joe Lombardo well enough to understand what the hell he’s thinking,” she said. “You could think he’s moderate. It does not matter anymore. Anyone who is a Republican right now is complicit and cannot be trusted on fundamental freedoms like reproductive freedom.”

The GOP is in a “continual downward slide” into extremism, she added.

Reproductive Freedom for All on Friday announced candidate endorsements for Democrats Nicole Cannizzaro, who is running for attorney general, and Aaron Ford, who is running for governor.

It’s the first of a string of endorsements the organization plans to make in battleground states for the 2026 elections.

Cannizzaro, who the Current interviewed alongside Timmaraju last week, said reproductive rights won’t be stripped away from people through “one sweeping piece of legislation that says, ‘here’s a bill to take away all of your rights.’”

“They happen with the incremental policy changes that do affect people,” she said. “There are many ways to attack access, and we are watching that happen right before our eyes.”

Added Timmaraju, “The Trump administration has shown absolutely no limits on how they will mess with states and their administration of federal programs.”

Telemedicine, which is filling voids where physical reproductive health clinics have been forced to close, is one target. The prescription drugs used in medical abortions have been another target.

“Abortion is legal in this state but if the Trump administration managed to circumvent access to medicinal abortion through a number of ways, there’s no protection for Nevadans, even if you codified it in your constitution. They are being nefarious,” said Timmaraju.

Attorney general races play a major role in combatting attempts to strip protections away, she added.

“Every state where we’ve passed a ballot measure but don’t have an AG on our side, we’ve had problems,” she said. “In the states where we’ve passed (ballot measures), and we have an AG who’s willing to enforce, is where we’ve actually seen the realization of the promise of the measure.”

The state of reproductive rights in Nevada

In 2024, Nevadans overwhelmingly supported Question 6, a proposal to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The measure must pass again on the 2026 general election ballot to go into effect.

If passed, abortion rights would be further strengthened in the state. Abortion already has some strong protections, primarily through a law passed as a ballot measure in the 1990s. Changing that law requires a vote of the people.

In December, Nevada Medicaid expanded its coverage of abortion services, the result of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Nevada. That lawsuit argued that the existing policy violated the state’s Equal Rights Amendment, which voters passed in 2022.

But not everything has trended toward expanded access.

Earlier this year, Nevada’s 1985 parental notification law, which requires that minors notify their parents or guardian before having an abortion, went into effect for the first time. A decades-long injunction had kept the law from being enforced.

After that decision, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte announced it would fight the ruling in court but their efforts were thwarted in federal court. A separate state challenge is still pending.

Cannizzaro criticized the parental notification law, saying the years she spent as a Clark County prosecutor influenced her perspective.

“People do not like to think about the fact that there are children who are living in homes where they’re being sexually abused, and oftentimes their rapist is a family member, so it’s not safe for that child to ask for parental notification in order to not have to birth their rapist’s baby,” she said. “That is a very real thing that happens.”

The parental notification law now being enforced lacks protections for those children, she continued, and puts them at greater risk.

When asked if there had ever been conversations in the Legislature about addressing the 1985 law, Cannizzaro said there hadn’t been.

“Because there was an injunction in place for so long, there were other things that we were looking at,” she said. “The statutes that were actually on the books and in effect and not affected by any sort of injunction.”

Among those priorities was 2019’s Trust Nevada Women Act, which decriminalized medicated abortion and removed antiquated informed consent laws, such as a mandate that physicians tell patients about the emotional impact of an abortion.

Cannizzaro recalls the criticism at the time: “Why do you have to take outdated penalties out of state law? This is not an issue. This hasn’t been an issue. It’s not an issue.”

But attempts by the Trump administration to use century-old laws to restrict the prescription drugs used in medicinal abortion shows that antiquated laws can be a source of ammo for legislators or administrations looking to restrict access.

A focus on IVF

In the 2025 Legislative Session, Cannizzaro sponsored a “right to assisted reproduction treatment” bill, which would have required many private and public insurance companies to cover procedures like in-vitro fertilization. Lombardo vetoed it.

Cannizzaro said the governor’s office gave her no indication that he was considering vetoing the IVF bill, which received some bipartisan support, or any of the 87 bills he vetoed. This despite her office asking for feedback on the IVF bill and dozens of others prior to their final passage by the Legislature.

“We brought this to the governor’s office many times. ‘Hey, can you take a look at these bills? Hey, can you let us know where you’re at? Hey, can you let us know?’”

The IVF bill concerns raised in Lombardo’s veto letter could have been answered by watching the bill hearing, said Cannizzaro, or by having a conversation with her.

The veto letter cited, among other things, the potential cost to Nevada Medicaid. That provision, Cannizzaro said, was scheduled to go into effect in a future biennium, and Medicaid staff had indicated they would apply for an available waiver allowing the federal government to cover some of the cost.

Cannizzaro said she is committed, whether still in the Nevada State Senate or as attorney general, to making sure IVF returns “front and center” in the next regular legislative session.

Members of the caucus are “ready to take up that mantle,” she said, “because there’s no way that bill should have been vetoed.”