The Truth About Abortion Republicans Want to Hide
They're enshrining the wishes of the most radical 10% of Americans into law.
Republicans are rightly terrified that abortion will be the dominant issue of this year’s presidential campaign, contributing to their defeat just as it did in many races in the 2022 midterms and any number of off-year and special elections since then. But if anything, we’re underestimating the effect it could have, especially if Democrats keep pounding away at it. Because the truth is that we are already in a situation of legal abortion radicalism.
Republican states have gone much farther in outlawing abortion than even their own voters want. It’s difficult to find an issue that’s so high-profile where one of the parties is so wildly out of step with public opinion, not just in what it supports but what it has put into law.
Let’s consider some recent polling on abortion from the Public Religion Research Institute, which surveyed enough people to have figures for all 50 states. Here’s the topline result:
More than six in ten Americans (64%) say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, marking the fourth consecutive year in which at least 60% of Americans favor abortion legality. By contrast, 35% of Americans say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases; however, this includes just 9% of Americans who believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases.
That 9 percent, the sliver of Americans who want abortion to always be illegal, is not only a minority nationally, it’s a minority in every state, and not just a minority but a tiny minority. The highest figure PRRI found for the belief that abortion should always be illegal was just 16 percent, in North Dakota and Kentucky. Look at the last column on the right:
Republicans are well aware of how spectacularly unpopular this position is, which is why most of them, especially at the national level, are reluctant to say that’s what they support. But it is what they support. Which you can tell, because when they had the chance to put it into law, that’s exactly what they did, in state after state.
As of now there are 11 states with bans on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. Take Texas, for instance, home to over 30 million people. According to PRRI, 56 percent of Texans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and only 11 percent say it should be illegal in all cases. But the belief of the 11 percent was written into law.
Even where state laws include exceptions for rape or incest, the exceptions are written in ways that make them almost impossible to satisfy, including strict time limits and legal hurdles few if any women will be able to overcome. So even in the states that do have such exceptions to their abortion bans, if they’re functionally meaningless, that means policy still reflects the preferences of only that miniscule number of voters.
Then you have states with laws like the one that just went into effect in Florida, which bans abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy, at which point most women don’t even know they’re pregnant. While some women will be able to get an abortion before that deadline, the number will be small, which means that again, for all intents and purposes, the wishes of the 9 percent of Floridians who want a total ban will have prevailed.
Republicans don’t want the public to understand their radicalism
Now let’s step back and put this in the context of recent history. For decades leading up to the Dobbs decision in 2022, the essential Republican strategy was to say they wanted to outlaw abortion while also saying that they weren’t really going to outlaw abortion. Sure, we believe that life begins at conception, but c’mon — it’s not like we’re going to pass a national ban when we control Congress.
And the Supreme Court nominees we put up, bred by the Federalist Society with iron-clad conservative commitments? Who knows how they might rule on Roe! They have no beliefs at all beyond an inspiring commitment to the Framers’ design! In fact, Roe might never come up at all, they would say. Here, for instance, is the head of the Judicial Crisis Network, an organization dedicated to stocking the judiciary with far-right judges, saying in 2018 that liberals warning that Roe might be overturned was “a lot of scaremongering,” because “it's unlikely the court would ever get that square question presented to it, anyway.”
I can’t think of another issue where activists and politicians advocating for a particular policy change were simultaneously so eager to assure everyone that the change they were advocating for would never happen, so no one should worry.
That kind of brazen dishonesty always put reporters in an awkward position, given their commitment to both-sidesing every important issue. If they said “You’re clearly lying, and I refuse to just pass your lies on to my audience,” they’d be accused of liberal bias. So instead, they showed some skepticism with a gentle follow-up or two, but basically took Republican lies on this topic at face value. They did the same when every Republican Supreme Court nominee would say under oath that they had no opinions on abortion, at least none that would matter in how they would rule. During every confirmation, some of us would be out there shouting “They’re lying! Can’t you see they’re lying?!” but to no avail.
Over the years, the news media got used to presenting abortion within a frame of partisan division: This is a closely divided country, the two parties have opposite positions since they represent two sides of this closely divided electorate, and public opinion leans a bit toward the pro-choice side but like the country itself is still closely divided. If it was ever true, it certainly isn’t anymore. The truth is that the public is clearly pro-choice, and more important, the Republican Party now represents only that one in ten Americans who want to outlaw abortion completely. Wherever they have the ability to do so, they’re enshrining that tiny minority’s beliefs into law, with devastating consequences. And if they can do it at the national level, they absolutely will.
This is the Democrats’ best issue. It dovetails with the pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian message, it splits the Republican coalition even in very red states, and it should keep the left flank from drifting. The Biden campaign should hammer it relentlessly.
Extreme partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, Christian Nationalism and good old fashioned racism has given Republicans unchallengeable power in most of the red states. It doesn't matter what the majority of the people want, most of the population is clustered in cities anyway without enough representation to make a difference in the legislature. All that they care about is avoiding a primary challenge from the right. Hence, they cater to the loud far right wing anti-abortion, women hating minority. This will not change until a new Supreme Court rules that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional and reinstates the VRA. That all said, this post-Dobbs dynamic could shift statewide races in most red states. South Dakota may shift because no one like puppy killers.