Tweet Share Share Comment In Tuesday’s elections, a now-familiar pattern repeated itself: When abortion was on the ballot, abortion won.
Ohioans voted definitively to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitution. Kentuckians elected a Democratic governor who put abortion rights at the center of his campaign. Virginians handed Democrats control of the state Legislature, on the heels of Republicans attempting to ban abortion after 15 weeks. And these victories came after earlier abortion rights wins in red, purple, and blue states alike: Kansas, Kentucky, California, Michigan, Montana, Vermont.
Abortion rights supporters and opponents are responding predictably: Those who support abortion rights argue that voters should have a say in their state’s abortion laws—not to mention what happens to their own bodies—and they are pushing for more ballot initiatives, including in several right-leaning states.
Those who oppose abortion rights essentially say that voters should not have a choice about reproductive rights—much like women, who should likewise be deprived of their agency. A similar division is playing out globally, as countries that move toward more democratic systems of governance expand abortion access, while those who are tilting toward the authoritarian have seen abortion rights contracted in recent years.
Tuesday’s results were a huge relief for feminists. Many of us worried that this election, held in an off year well after the shock of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe had worn off—and at a moment when approval is very low for President Biden—might be the break in the pattern. But voters were clear: Abortion should be legal.
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That’s good news for Biden in 2024, if he can make the case that his opponent—most likely Donald Trump—poses an immediate danger to abortion rights. Trump, for his part, seems to have read the room, blaming the GOP-fueled frenzy of abortion restrictions on his sustained party’s losses. But as is typical for the former president, he dissembles and dodges, supporting abortion restrictions while also saying those restrictions are terrible. And of course, he claims he could personally broker a compromise. “What’s going to happen is you’re going to come up with a number of weeks or months, you’re going to come up with a number that’s going to make people happy,” he said in September. (For what it’s worth, that clearly did not work in Virginia.)
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Of course, Trump has also said that women who have abortions should face “some sort of punishment”—while the men who got them pregnant should not. This is not a candidate whom voters concerned about abortion rights can trust.
Unfortunately, Joe Biden has been at best a fair-weather friend to abortion rights advocates. Throughout his long career in politics, the president has repeatedly stated his personal opposition to and discomfort with abortion, and largely tried to avoid the issue. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade during his presidency, though, abortion landed squarely at his feet. And although he has called for protecting abortion rights, it’s clear to anyone watching that the issue is simply not one of great personal importance to him, and that he remains uncomfortable even discussing it. That doesn’t exactly make him a compelling foil for Trump, who is a career misogynist who couldn’t care less about abortion rights but is happy, in order to regain power, to tell voters whatever he thinks they want to hear.
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The big question for 2024 and beyond, though, is whether the Republican Party is sufficiently chastened by rebuke after rebuke at the ballot box to quit its aggressive assault on abortion rights. The procedure is now banned or restricted in every state in the South except for Virginia, a distinction that Virginia voters have just made clear they would like to maintain. It seems Republicans, though, have decided that the right answer is to simply keep banning abortion but stop talking about it, and refuse to allow voters to have a say. Anti-abortion groups push for the same, arguing that the best strategy may be to chip away at abortion rights by painting Democrats as extremists and imposing gestational limits on the procedure. But they are also clear that those limits are simply way stations to get Americans comfortable with abortion bans, en route to banning the procedure entirely in all 50 states.
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Virginia’s Popular Governor Risked It All on Abortion. Oops.
Read More Abortion opponents are correct that, when you poll Americans, many say abortion should be legal but with restrictions. The thing is, though, most Americans are seeing for the first time what it means to outlaw abortion. And one of the things that they’re seeing is that pregnancy is complex, that much can go unexpectedly wrong, and that requiring doctors to parse punitive and vague anti-abortion laws is a recipe for tragedy. What voters have told pollsters about their theoretical views on abortion may not directly translate to how they vote after they’ve heard women’s heart-rending stories of why they needed abortions past whatever arbitrary week limit the GOP decides to push.
Many Americans seem to be landing in a sensible place when it comes to abortion rights: I have my own personal views about what I think is acceptable, but the human body and this issue are incredibly complicated, and we should leave reproductive decisionmaking in the hands of women and their doctors. That view may become even further entrenched as more and more women tell stories of being denied abortions during medical emergencies, or after being raped, or in the aftermath of having a much-wanted pregnancy diagnosed with a devastating abnormality.
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If there has been one positive outcome from the demise of Roe—and to be clear, there is nothing positive about the demise of Roe—it’s that Americans are increasingly comprehending that abortion isn’t primarily a divisive political issue but a fundamental health need. Much of what was spoken of in vague terms—miscarriage management, fetal anomaly incompatible with life—the public now understands to be related to abortion too. They’ve seen the GOP try to force child rape victims into motherhood. They’ve seen women lose their uteruses and nearly their lives because they were pregnant in a state where abortion is banned. They’ve seen “pro-life” legislators attempt to force women to carry doomed or dangerous pregnancies to term, a unique kind of cruelty. And it turns out that voters really don’t like any of that. And these stories will continue to be told, even if Republican Party politicians pivot and emphasize that they’re trying to ban abortion at 15 weeks instead of 6 weeks, as Gov. Glenn Youngkin tried to do in Virginia.
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The GOP now seems primed to adopt two parallel strategies: Continue to emphasize bans after some number of weeks, and simply don’t let voters weigh in. While abortion rights advocates try to get the issue on the ballot, Republicans are fighting hard to keep it off, even as they press forward on myriad bans and restrictions in state legislatures and in Congress.
Supporters of abortion rights have long bristled when their opponents are described as “pro-life” instead of “anti-choice.” As Republicans now join some of the world’s most notoriously authoritarian regimes in their opposition to abortion, and as they fight not just against abortion rights but against voters having any say on the issue at all, the term seems more fitting than ever.
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