New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is a very smart man capable of deep insights into a broad array of public concerns. But in a column this week wherein he expresses confusion about the sources of the currently powerful backlash to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, he reflects the myopia of his fellow anti-abortion advocates.
Why, he asks, has there been “a clear shift in favor of abortion rights” since the mid-2010s, showing that “more Americans support abortion without restriction that at any point since Roe v. Wade was handed down”? Douthat is chagrined that the strength of his cause has flagged precisely when it is needed most with abortion policy having been thrust fully into the political realm by a Supreme Court dominated by his fellow conservatives.
He clearly wants to blame this development on the man who made the reversal of Roe possible: Donald Trump. But first he explores other theories. One is that abortion sentiment is tardily but decisively following the rapid decline of other conservative religious-based beliefs, like opposition to same-sex marriage, as religious observance itself declines. Another is hazier:
The last eight years coincide with a trend toward disconnection and depression among younger Americans, a special increase in anxiety and unhappiness among teenage girls, and the seeming alienation of the sexes from each other. In such a social and psychological environment, maybe abortion access seems more necessary, as a form of protection in a harsher social world.
I don’t know how serious Douthat was in advancing an anomie explanation for the rise in pro-choice opinions in the American electorate. But he rushes on to the destination to which he’s already signaled he’s heading: “If you look at the trend toward pro-choice-without-exceptions sentiment, across several different polling sources, the shift seems to accelerate right around 2016.”
You probably know what happened then.
One does not need to be a monocausalist to see how the identification of the anti-abortion cause with his particular persona, his personal history and public style, might have persuaded previously wavering and ambivalent Americans to see the pro-life movement differently than they did before.
We are supposed to believe that Trump made the anti-abortion cause disreputable. I think that’s gotten it backward.
Until Trump was elected president on a platform that included the first-ever specific promise to shape a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe, the threat to long-settled abortion rights was largely abstract and entirely hypothetical. His election made the threat tangible, and his actions in placing three carefully vetted conservative jurists on the court made it imminent and then a reality. Of course this grew and intensified pro-choice popular sentiment. Restrictions on abortion rights were unsavory without any help from Trump. His role was simply executing the actions that more fastidious conservatives like Douthat had long dreamed of through Republican presidencies from Nixon through George W. Bush that promised but did not deliver the reversal of Roe.
Far from poisoning the well for the anti-abortion movement, Trump risked his own political future by harnessing his fate to a fundamentally unpopular anti-abortion cause even as he roused the pro-choice majority into militant action. He probably had no choice: Unlike other conservative shibboleths like free trade or entitlement reform that Trump tossed over the side, anti-abortion sentiments had a real grip on the GOP, particularly on the conservative evangelicals who became central to Trump’s base and to his reelection campaign.
What Douthat needs to accept is that the pro-choice upsurge he’s witnessing was always there but was submerged by the belief that Roe would protect abortion rights for the foreseeable future. Once that assurance was gone, so, too, was the complacency that led people with strong pro-choice views to let other issues become crucial to their decisions about voting preferences.
To approach this issue from another angle: What if the Supreme Court had reversed Roe in 1992, as most observers expected, when it heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey? Would there have been a big backlash then? Almost certainly yes. And that was long before Donald Trump appeared on the political scene.
Anti-abortion activists can’t blame their problems on Trump or teen anomie or even the decline in what they regard as authentic Christianity. A majority of Americans really do think women should be in charge of their reproductive systems, and thanks to the long-time domination of the Republican Party by anti-abortion extremists, they don’t trust the GOP to reflect their values on this issue. That’s a problem Republicans can only address by severing their alliance with the forced-birth lobby right away.
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Ross Douthat Is Wrong About What Caused a Powerful Pro-Abortion Backlash
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11.04.2024
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is a very smart man capable of deep insights into a broad array of public concerns. But in a column this week wherein he expresses confusion about the sources of the currently powerful backlash to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, he reflects the myopia of his fellow anti-abortion advocates.
Why, he asks, has there been “a clear shift in favor of abortion rights” since the mid-2010s, showing that “more Americans support abortion without restriction that at any point since Roe v. Wade was handed down”? Douthat is chagrined that the strength of his cause has flagged precisely when it is needed most with abortion policy having been thrust fully into the political realm by a Supreme Court dominated by his fellow conservatives.
He clearly wants to blame this development on the man who made the reversal of Roe possible: Donald Trump. But first he explores other theories. One is that abortion sentiment is tardily but decisively following the rapid decline of other conservative religious-based beliefs, like opposition to same-sex marriage, as religious observance itself declines. Another is hazier:
The last eight years coincide with a trend toward disconnection and........
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