This article, written by Pro-Choice North Carolina Executive Director Tara Romano, originally appeared in NC Newsline.

As we sprint towards Election Day 2024 with high-profile presidential and congressional elections on the horizon, many of us are talking about how these elections will impact abortion access in North Carolina and around the country. Even if we elect a pro-choice White House, however, the specter of nine unelected justices appointed for life to the highest court in the land where they play an outsized role in abortion access remains. For anti-abortion lawmakers, getting six anti-abortion justices to form a supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court was indeed the key to pushing their unpopular and regressive agenda.

With presidents appointing U.S. Supreme Court justices and the U.S. Senate confirming them, we do have a way to bring our voices to this branch of the federal government, albeit indirectly. Voters shouldn’t forget that we also have state judges issuing rulings that are equally as consequential for our state’s residents, often impacting our day-to-day lives. In North Carolina these judges are not appointed — we directly elect them.

As judges are part of our political system, acting as the third branch in our system of checks and balances, they are political actors but not necessarily in the same ways as legislators or governors. While judges certainly have their own personal ideologies, and in North Carolina are labeled on the ballot with a political party, their role is to act as a check on any executive and legislative overreach that acts to deny us our rights as promised in documents such as the federal and state constitutions, as well as interpret our laws. The role of judges is not to advance any type of personal ideology, but to look at laws and facts in front of them to determine if they are unduly restricting the rights and freedoms set forth in our foundational documents.

This is especially true of state Supreme Courts. While we would never expect judges to have no personal political beliefs, we can and should expect them to leave politics to the side as they rule on cases that impact our most fundamental rights and freedoms. In a time of hyper-polarization in our electoral politics, judges are supposed to conduct themselves above the political fray.

A good example of this is the Kansas Supreme Court. While the voters of Kansas were the first to vote on a ballot initiative to protect abortion rights after the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the Kansas legislature is still a reliably anti-abortion institution. Despite the supposed “red” nature of the state government, though, the justices on the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the Kansas state constitution protects the right to abortion for residents of the state, a ruling they affirmed again earlier this summer.

Contrast that to the highly politicized Florida Supreme Court, which earlier this year overturned its own ruling about state protections for abortion access. In a 1980 ballot initiative, Florida voters opted to add a right to privacy and freedom from governmental interference in personal decisions to their state constitution. A 1989 Florida Supreme Court ruling affirmed that this meant the state constitution protected the right to abortion, and all abortion restrictions passed by the state legislature needed to be balanced against this right.

This was the standard in Florida for 30 years. That changed in 2019, with the ascension of an ultra-conservative governor who set his sights on achieving national prominence within a political party that had an increasingly extreme anti-abortion platform. This governor appointed five of the seven current justices on the state supreme court while signing into law a six-week ban that would have been considered unconstitutional under the original court ruling. This past spring that same state supreme court overturned the court’s 1989 ruling. Abortion access in Florida has been decimated not because of a change in the constitution, but because of a change in who was on the court.

Who serves on the court matters, not because of political ideology, but because of judicial philosophy. We need and demand judges who will leave their politics behind when they put on their judicial robes to make decisions that impact all North Carolinians.

In North Carolina, we vote on judges for our state Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Superior Courts, and District Courts. While access to abortion has not often come directly in front of our state courts in North Carolina, the loss of federal protections makes it more likely for that to happen here. State courts around the country are weighing in on the full range of reproductive healthcare access, and there is no reason to think North Carolina will be an exception.

It’s not just our state Supreme Court that is important in protecting our rights. The lower courts often impact us more directly and may be where more of us interact with judges. These courts hear criminal and civil cases, small claims, and family law proceedings. It’s been said we can have our best days, like getting married before a judge, and our worst days, like a difficult child custody hearing, in front of our state courts.

With the increasing criminalization of abortion, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare by hostile legislatures, cases involving self-managed abortion, miscarriages, stillbirths, assisting minors accessing abortion, interactions with anti-abortion protestors at clinics, and even providing information for abortion care can and will come before our state’s courts. These types of cases have been happening across the country in the wake of Dobbs, and even before the fall of Roe.

As we’ve seen anti-abortion elected officials become more emboldened, we’ve also seen more attempts by these officials to use their office, at whatever level, to push an anti-abortion agenda. As an example, late last year we saw a North Carolina Appeals Court ruling where some judges tried to insert their belief that life begins at conception into a ruling, despite the case having nothing to do with reproductive rights (the case concerned parental custody). That ruling was later withdrawn, but we in the reproductive justice movement know that legal recognition of “personhood” for fertilized eggs at the time of conception is the ultimate goal of anti-abortion extremists, as that recognition would outlaw all abortion, everywhere, and many types of contraception. While this particular ruling was withdrawn, we know that we can’t ignore these seemingly minor attempts to insert personal beliefs into legal precedent.

Again, judges have their personal beliefs, but that can’t translate into partisan agendas from the bench. Your plan to vote must include how you will vote in judicial races. Too often voters will check off the top-ticket races and leave the races further down the ballot — like judges — blank. In lower profile elections where the winner may have a few hundred more votes than their opponent(s), every vote counts, and who is on the bench matters.

Common Cause NC, Emancipate NC, North Carolina for the People, and Pro-Choice North Carolina have created a website to help you better understand the importance of judicial races and the need for a fair and independent judiciary. The website content continues to be built out and you can add to it! You can find the website here: www.whyjudgesmatternc.com