The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago

For better or worse, the US Supreme Court has got exactly what it wanted in Michigan. Its decision to overturn Roe vs Wade, abolishing a US constitutional right to abortion, is forcing Michiganders to decide at the ballot box whether they want the procedure to be freely available, restricted, or impossible.

Michigan is my home state and its abortion battles have bookended my life. When I was growing up, abortion was illegal under a 1931 law — one that was set to be reinstated after last month’s Roe reversal, until a Michigan judge temporarily blocked it.

After 50 years of thinking about it, I’m still not sure where I stand: I am pro-choice, but I also abhor abortion. Now, as Michiganders fight this out — in courts, in the legislature and at the ballot box — I turned to some of them to ask for their opinion. How will they vote on a proposed November ballot initiative that would enshrine broad abortion rights in the Michigan constitution?

More than 750,000 Michiganders have signed a petition to get the Reproductive Freedom for All constitutional amendment on to the ballot for the November midterm elections. The measure would guarantee everyone in the state the right to a pre-viability abortion, but it includes exceptions that would allow late-term terminations to protect the “physical or mental health of the pregnant individual”.

Ron and Paula (not their real names), a Michigan couple in their late 50s, describe how abortion has touched their lives: their 15-year-old granddaughter terminated a pregnancy after an uncle raped her. They believe abortion should be legal under such circumstances. They also support abortion in the case of a 10-year-old rape victim who became a cause célèbre for Democrats after an Ohio abortion ban forced her to flee the state to terminate her pregnancy.

But for them, the Michigan ballot initiative goes too far. “I’m a hunter and I know what it is to take a life,” Larry told me by phone from Michigan. “To end a life just to use it as birth control, that’s just wrong. I support very early abortions . . . but late term is out of the question”.

Lauren chimed in that “we’ve gone too far with women’s rights. What about the baby’s rights after there is a heartbeat?”

Both agree, however, that voters will have the last word: “if I’m outvoted that’s just the way it is”. 

Ashlea Phenicie and Christen Pollo are young female Michiganders with radically opposing views of the ballot initiative: Phenicie, director of communications for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan, one of the primary backers of the measure, says that it merely reinstates reproductive rights recently stripped away by the Supreme Court and would guarantee that decisions on abortion are left to “patients and medical experts, not politicians”.

Pollo, spokesperson for Citizens to Support MI Women & Children, in the opposition camp, says the measure would go far beyond Roe vs Wade, permitting abortion at any time under the “physical and mental health” exception. “No other state in the country has unregulated abortion through all nine months of pregnancy as a constitutional right,” she said. Her opposition to abortion has nothing to do with religion, she says, but she sees it as a violent solution to pregnancy. “I believe in human rights for all human beings, and I believe we need to find non violent solutions to all problems.”

So Michigan could soon become one of the first states to vote on the shape of a post-Roe world — just as the Supreme Court intended. But the battle is unlikely to end there, legal experts say. Opinion in 17 states where abortion has been newly prohibited, or will soon be, is more narrowly divided than it is in national polls.

The Pew Research Centre found that in such states, 46 per cent of adults approved of the Supreme court’s decision and 52 per cent disapproved — compared with 41 per cent and 57 per cent nationally.

With opinion so narrowly divided in battleground states, it seems a fair bet that a large chunk of the electorate will end up disgruntled either way. Roe vs Wade was decided when I was a teenager. I’ll be lucky if Michiganders stop fighting about what should replace it while I’m still around to care.