The GOP’s Abortion Albatross

When the radical right-wing majority of the Supreme Court overturned Roe two years ago, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the Dobbs decision, “With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.” Instead of satiating the right, the fall of Roe opened the floodgates. If eliminating the constitutional protection to abortion was possible, what else might be? A federal abortion ban? What about banning IVF? Maybe birth control? An emboldened right has a very long wish list.

Everything post-Roe has moved at lightning speed, with 21 states going backward by either banning the procedure or restricting it severely. America is significantly more dystopian than our mothers dreamed in their worst nightmares, as women’s lives are put at risk due to doctors’ fears of acting even in a medical emergency. In Tennessee, doctors refuse abortions to women carrying babies that will surely die, while a woman having a miscarriage who sought care in Missouri and Kansas was denied an abortion, prompting the Biden administration to issue a “statement of deficiency” to those hospitals. A report by Lift Louisiana, a reproductive rights organization, found that doctors were in some cases waiting until pregnant women had entered their second trimester to offer prenatal care, worried they could be blamed for a first-trimester miscarriage.

In this post-Roe hellscape, Republican politicians now dictate the medical care that pregnant women can and can’t have in red states. Women who want or need abortions are forced to travel hundreds of miles. Some become infertile, while others are severely traumatized, all because a conservative supermajority created by Donald Trump with his three Supreme Court picks took away a right women had in America for nearly half a century.

If anything, losing this right has only convinced more Americans that abortion is health care. Sixty-three percent of US adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the Pew Research Center, and new internal polling provided to me by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee speaks to the political reverberations ahead of the November elections that will determine which party controls the White House and both houses of Congress.

The DCCC found in its battleground polling across 67 congressional districts that abortion “is more likely to drive voter choice than any other: 36% of voters would not vote for a candidate for Congress if they disagreed with them on abortion rights.”

That could be problematic for some of the 125 Republicans who sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which defined the term human being to be “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.” Democrats believe that reproductive rights will help them take back the House.

Impact Research president Molly Murphy, who conducted the DCCC poll, said in an email, “We already know that a majority of voters support protecting reproductive freedom. Our data also shows they will vote on it. The public sees extreme Republicans applauding the Supreme Court overturning Roe and their efforts to pass a nationwide ban — and voters are telling us that they feel so strongly about protecting abortion rights, [that] it’s emerged as a top ‘dealbreaker’ issue for voters.”

Beyond abortion rights, Republicans have also staked out unpopular positions on birth control and IVF. GOP senators refused to codify birth control by blocking the Right to Conception Act even as nine out of 10 American voters feel that certain contraceptives like birth control pills and condoms should be legal. As for IVF, Senate Republicans blocked legislation to codify the practice by voting against the Right to IVF Act, even as 86% of Americans think it should be legal. The Heritage Foundation hopes to regulate IVF, while the Southern Baptist Convention recently approved a measure opposing it.

When it was first reported that Roe would be overturned, in May 2022, one conservative media figure wrote in Politico, “Abortion Might Not Be the Wedge Issue It Used to Be.” Another followed up weeks later, after the decision was public: “Polls Show Americans Don’t Care that Much about Dobbs—and Won’t Base Their Vote on it.” Of course, abortion rights clearly galvanized voters in the 2022 midterms—and again in the 2023 off-year elections. And yet a few days ago I noticed a GOP pollster seeming to downplay the impact of abortion rights in 2024, writing, “At this point in the 2022 cycle, the Dobbs decision hadn’t happened yet. A reminder of just how fresh this was on voters’ minds in 2022 compared to how likely it is to be this year.”

Perhaps the loss of bodily autonomy is not such a big deal to Republicans, who already seem determined to limit women’s rights in other ways, from restricting birth control to IVF. But voters seem motivated to keep the rights they have—and fight for those threatened by the right. To borrow from James Carville’s famous 1992 election tagline, perhaps the choice for voters in 2024 can be summed as, “It’s the autonomy, stupid.”