Americans haven’t forgotten that the ability to decide if and when to become a parent is one of the most essential, personal and life-changing decisions we’ll ever make. And we especially haven’t forgotten that the GOP is primarily responsible for wresting that decision away from many millions of us.
Because we remember both of these things, the issue of abortion remains a common thread in upcoming elections around the country — much to the consternation of Republicans. A year after the issue boosted Democrats in the midterms, the GOP is struggling to convince voters that the abortion bans the party has pushed for decades are some sort of collective fever dream. They want us to think abortion bans are a mass hysterical event that has caused us to hallucinate traveling far from home for abortion care, to invent the state-mandated traumas of forced birth, or to imagine that the pregnant people we’ve lost to poor maternal care were always ghosts, irrelevant and expendable, and never our living, loved ones.
Widespread (and growing) support for abortion rights has dulled the glory of what ought to be a victory lap for proponents of forced pregnancy.
The fever dream belongs entirely to the anti-abortion politicians who promised to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now that they’ve succeeded, widespread (and growing) support for abortion rights — which have won at the polls every time folks have been asked to weigh in since the Dobbs decision in June 2022 — has dulled the glory of what ought to be a victory lap for proponents of forced pregnancy. It’s not a question of whether proliferating abortion bans following the fall of Roe will continue to influence voters, but how much those voters — especially center-leaning Republicans and the ever-elusive (if at all extant) independent contingent — will take abortion restrictions into account when they head to the polls.
In Ohio, polls are already open for early voting on Issue 1, the constitutional amendment that would enshrine the right to abortion, as well as contraception and fertility and miscarriage care, in the Buckeye State. Importantly, the passage of Issue 1 would block the Ohio Supreme Court from greenlighting a pending six-week abortion ban that would further decimate the availability of clinical abortion care in the Midwest. In the face of polls showing a likely defeat for abortion foes, Ohio’s anti-abortion Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and his allies have deployed a blatant misinformation campaign, hoping to recast Issue 1 as a measure that would empower fickle, homicidal pregnant people and abortion providers. (Of course it wouldn’t — later abortion care, like any and all abortion care, is a necessary component of reproductive autonomy for all of us.)
While Ohio is the only state that’s put abortion explicitly on the ballot this fall, abortion rights are also at the center of key elections in Kentucky and Virginia, and they’re playing a significant role in other states that appear to be less immediately urgent battlegrounds, such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where Democrats have had the foresight to lay important groundwork against anti-abortion Republicans trying to gain footholds in state politics.
In Kentucky, the contest for governor between incumbent Democrat Andy Beshear and Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron has pitted Beshear’s support for reproductive rights against Cameron’s flip-flopping scramble to position himself as either very-anti-abortion or only-sort-of-very anti-abortion. In keeping with the contemporary GOP’s squeamishness on an issue they championed for decades, Cameron’s approach seems to depend, on any given day, on how receptive his campaign imagines voters to be on the question of rarely employed “exceptions” to abortion bans.
Virginia is a more unusual — and more unsettling — case. There, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has instead amplified the abortion issue, hoping that voters will fall for what he’s portraying as a “consensus” 15-week ban that would make it even harder to access abortion for Southerners and others who are already forced to travel hundreds and thousands of miles for health care. Youngkin isn’t up for re-election in November, but he’s hoping his proposal will soften the hard-line anti-abortion aims of the down-ballot Republicans who are gunning to take over the state’s General Assembly.
Ask any “blue” voter in a “red” state: none of the fourteen states that fully ban abortion today moved cleanly overnight from abortion-friendly to abortion-hostile.
Youngkin’s 15-week ban gambit is ostensibly aimed at staking out a stance on abortion that middle-of-the-road voters will agree to. But abortion bans don’t, and have never, stopped at an ostensibly centrist “consensus” when conservative politicians enjoy the kind of dominance that Youngkin and his fellow anti-abortion Republicans are seeking in Virginia. Ask any “blue” voter in a “red” state: None of the 14 states that fully ban abortion today moved cleanly overnight from abortion-friendly to abortion-hostile. Republicans, dogged in their commitment to the lies, gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement they must rely on to secure power, have worn down electorates in “red” states over many years, gesturing toward moderation before embracing extremism on abortion and a host of other issues.
In this light, it’s not hard to read between the poorly crafted lines of Youngkin’s proposal: His 15-week abortion ban is not a compromise, but an attempt to secure a Republican majority that will start by banning abortion in the second trimester, but will not stop there. Youngkin’s hope, and the goal of Republicans nationwide (especially after the election of the evangelical Christian and right-wing crank Mike Johnson to the House speakership) is to pull a full bait-and-switch, acting as if voters demanded abortion bans that demean and devalue our families.
At the heart of this anti-abortion conceit, in Virginia and anywhere else, is the fundamentally misogynist idea that voters who care about their own reproductive lives, and the reproductive lives of their children and grandchildren, are too clueless to recognize when they’re being hoodwinked. Republicans are betting that the only voters who care about abortion rights are women, and that women voters are too stupid to know when we’re being lied to. Which is also why they think that we’ll forget, on Election Day, that abortion access doesn’t matter every day.