On the back of their ballots, New Yorkers have the choice to vote up or down on up to six ballot initiatives, one statewide and five specific to NYC. They should give the thumbs up on Proposal Number One; the other five they can feel free to take them or leave them. There’s plenty we can criticize about the statewide ballot measure to amend the state Constitution, not least of which is the confounding decision not to actually specifically use the word “abortion” anywhere within it. We don’t really know what Albany Democrats were thinking; perhaps they themselves would not be able to explain it. Like much else in our esteemed state Legislature, the motivations and negotiations in the run-up to finalized language are all but inscrutable. What we do know is that, despite the lack of that specific term, the amendment almost certainly would protect abortion rights, preventing as it does unequal treatment under law based on “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.” We also know that the hysterics around it are built on wild and speculative extrapolations; the amendment would prevent discrimination based on certain types of identity. As the NYC Bar Association pointed out, there’s nothing about parental rights, sports, or government services for undocumented immigrants. If all of these concerns seem to follow a pattern, it’s because they’re all the tired same red-meat issues that get trotted out whenever the right-wing wants to whip up the base, and that’s no coincidence. They have seen that every abortion ballot proposal has gone the pro-choice way, including in deep red states, and know that there’s not a chance that a pro-abortion amendment will be an electoral loser in New York, which is why none of the coordinated opposition focuses on the abortion implications of the amendment. All of the other arguments are concocted to generate anger and turnout where they think they have a better shot at winning, but none of them hold water. New York should not be the first state in the nation to reject a pro-choice ballot measure in the post-Roe era. Yes, the state already has robust legal protections for reproductive health care, but it is both about the principle of the thing and the fact that changing the state Constitution is a taller order than the repealing of laws and regulations currently protecting abortion, if that were ever to be a real concern. Voters would be well served by voting yes on Proposal One, which is at its core about nothing more than ensuring that every New Yorker receives equal protection under the law, a principle we should all be able to embrace. As far as the remaining five New York City-specific ballot proposals, they are all at the margins of usefulness. That they even exist, along with the mayoral Charter Revision Commission which was created, was only to act as a wedge to displace the City Council’s quite terrible effort to push through its own ballot proposal on confirmation of mayoral appointments. There are certainly some ideas worthy of discussion among that crop of initiatives, but in their current form are effectively a half-baked afterthought. Let them be presented, and debated, as legislation.