It is easy to say
what a triumphant midterm election would have looked like for opponents of
abortion. The ballot initiative installing abortion rights into the Michigan
constitution would have failed. Pro-life measures in Kentucky and Montana would
have succeeded. And Republicans would have enjoyed a sweeping victory in both
the Senate and the House, making talk of a “Roevember” backlash against the
Dobbs decision obsolete.
اضافة اعلان
In each case the reverse happened: The pro-life side
lost every statewide ballot — in liberal California and Vermont as well as in
the states just listed — and Republicans underperformed expectations. This has
revived the summertime assumption that the Dobbs decision was a political
disaster for the GOP. It has confirmed professional Democrats in their
abortion-centric campaign strategy. And it has divided pro-lifers between
optimists who think Republicans just need to learn how to message more
effectively about abortion and pessimists who think the results revealed a
movement “dead in the water”, to quote conservative writer Aaron Renn.
Let us start with what the pro-life pessimists get
right. Tuesday’s results confirm the anti-abortion movement’s fundamental
disadvantages: While Americans are conflicted about abortion, a majority is
more pro-choice than pro-life, the pro-choice side owns almost all the
important cultural megaphones, and voters generally dislike sudden
unsettlements of social issues.
You can strategize around these problems to some
extent, contrasting incremental protections for the unborn with the left’s
pro-choice absolutism. But when you are the side seeking a change in settled
arrangements, voters may still choose the absolutism they know over the
uncertainty of where pro-life zeal might take them.
However, when abortion was not directly on the
ballot, many of those same voters showed no inclination to punish politicians
who backed abortion restrictions. Any pro-choice swing to the Democrats was
probably a matter of a couple of points in the overall vote for the House of
Representatives; meanwhile, Republican governors who signed “heartbeat”
legislation in Texas, Georgia and Ohio easily won reelection, and there was no
dramatic backlash in red states that now restrict abortion.
In other words, Republicans in 2022 traded a larger
margin in the House and maybe a Senate seat or two for a generational goal, the
end of Roe v. Wade. And more than that, they demonstrated that many voters who
might vote pro-choice on an up-down ballot will also accept, for the time
being, pro-life legislation in their states.
… Republicans in 2022 traded a larger margin in the House and maybe a Senate seat or two for a generational goal, the end of Roe v. Wade. And more than that, they demonstrated that many voters who might vote pro-choice on an up-down ballot will also accept, for the time being, pro-life legislation in their states.
For a movement that is clearly a moral minority,
that is an opportunity, not a death knell. Yes, blue and most purple states
will remain pro-choice in almost any imaginable version of the 2020s, and some
red states as well. But the fact that abortion is illegal with exceptions in 13
states, while heartbeat laws survived a key political test in Georgia and Ohio,
is hardly an abstract or Pyrrhic victory.
My colleagues at The Upshot recently reported on
data indicating that these restrictions prevented about 10,000 abortions across
the first two months following the Dobbs decision. Pro-life scholar Michael New
has suggested that the true figure is higher, based in part on abortion and
birthrate data from Texas following the passage of its heartbeat law in 2021.
But even just the lower figure adds up to 60,000 fewer abortions in a
post-Dobbs year, thousands of babies across the bloc of pro-life states who
will live because Roe was overturned.
From the pro-life movement’s perspective, nothing is
more important than making sure that bloc holds up. Yes, you need effective
swing-state strategies, and yes, the movement needs to push the national GOP
toward a more capacious and generous family policy.
But even national efforts need to be especially
concerned with what happens inside the existing pro-life states. Can their
life-of-the-mother exceptions prove flexible and humane? Can they find ways to
improve maternal health? Can state policy and pro-life philanthropy offer
alternatives to abortion that reduce the number of women crossing state lines to
end their pregnancies? Can their pro-life coalitions hold up against internal
pro-choice organizing and pressure from outside?
Above all, can they model a regional way of life, a
mix of law and policy and culture, that seems attractive to the country as a whole?
A somewhat cynical view of abortion politics, in
2022 and beyond, is that the pro-life movement can sustain its gains as long as
voters are effectively distracted, their pro-choice instincts muted by other
economic or cultural concerns.
Another view, though, looks at the muddle of
American opinion and sees a lot of people who would like to live in a society
that protects human life in utero but think the full anti-abortion vision is
not plausible, that in a modern society it just cannot be made to work.
That is what the pro-life movement won for itself in
this election, despite its more immediate defeats: a chance, in a big part of
the country, to win some of these doubters to its side.
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