Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republicans have suffered a string of defeats, from referenda on abortion rights to state supreme court races to gubernatorial and state legislative elections. It’s no surprise, then, that the GOP is desperate to avoid abortion becoming its 2024 albatross. But rather than neuter the issue by moderating its stance and respecting popular consensus, the party’s answer is to offer up duplicitous bromides meant to hoodwink voters.
This month’s off-year elections provided more evidence that most Americans reject a moralizing minority restricting their right to medical care. Deep-red Ohio easily passed Issue 1, enshrining the right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Virginia Democrats swept both legislative chambers after Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin pledged to push a 15-week ban. And Pennsylvania Democrats held onto a fifth seat on the state’s seven-member Supreme Court, winning by more than 6 percentage points in a race where abortion was the central issue.
Republicans know it would be political suicide to advocate for a 15-week national ban.
Jittery Republican officials and strategists flailed around for answers, ultimately taking to the media to contend, disingenuously, that they in fact want to compromise on the issue. Despite Virginia voters’ clear message to Youngkin, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel insisted on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that a 15-week ban was a “reasonable” and “consensus” position. She urged Republican candidates to run on that message — and to paint Democrats as “extreme on this issue.”
At the most recent Republican presidential primary debate, held the day after the elections, candidate Nikki Haley called for “consensus,” saying, “As much as I’m pro-life, I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice, and I don’t want them to judge me for being pro-life.” That’s a nice message for your neighborhood picnic, but it’s a deceptive punt on staking out a real policy position in a party that has defined how to be judgmental. As governor of South Carolina, after all, Haley signed into law a bill that banned abortion after 20 weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest. As a state legislator, she supported legislation that would have granted constitutional rights to a zygote.
The hard truth is that in the current environment, Republicans know it would be political suicide to advocate for a 15-week national ban. Even as former President Donald Trump brags about how he was “able to kill Roe v. Wade,” he refuses to say whether he’d sign such a ban. Instead, he pretends, as he told NBC News’ Kristen Welker, that “I’d negotiate something, and we’ll end up with peace on that issue.”
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., who represents a state whose legislature passed a near-total ban on abortion with limited exceptions, told The Washington Post, “We don’t win the debate very well publicly because we’ve sort of boiled it down to pro-life or pro-choice, as opposed to the nuance of it.” But the problem is not the GOP’s debating skills. Its judicial nominees and its legislation have shown its true colors to voters. GOP strategist Alice Stewart admitted to the Post that her side has been consistently losing. “We can continue to fight the same battle and continue to lose or we can reframe the battle and win,” she said, “and the way we do that is by having responsible conversations about meaningful abortion limits.”
It doesn’t take much effort to find out that McDaniel and other top Republicans pressing for supposedly better conversations are simply running interference for an out-of-control party in statehouses around the country. Laws making abortion illegal before 15 weeks are in place in 18 states, all of which have Republican-controlled legislatures. Before Ohioans passed Issue 1, Republicans first tried to change the rules for amending the state constitution with an August special election that would have required a supermajority of voters for an amendment to pass. After voters rejected that, Ohio Republicans ran a hysterical campaign against Issue 1, falsely claiming the amendment would erode parental rights and allow abortion up until the day before birth and gender transition surgery for minors. The Center for Christian Virtue, Ohio’s top Christian right advocacy group, called it “murder on the ballot.” Gov. Mike DeWine, sometimes portrayed as a “moderate” Republican, said Issue 1 went “much, much, much too far.”
These are not actions of lawmakers seeking consensus, compromise or reasonableness.
Several high-profile national Christian right figures and organizations backed up Ohio Republicans. “The Groups behind Ohio’s Issue 1 Favor Child Trans Surgeries, Abortion, Prostitution, and Open Borders,” read a scare headline in The Washington Stand, the news site of the Family Research Council. My Faith Votes, a national voter mobilization group for the religious right, told supporters in an email that “the Radical left” was behind the measure, which would be “one of the most radical expansions of abortion in history.” Alliance Defending Freedom CEO and President Kristen Waggoner called the referendum “an issue of biblical righteousness” and encouraged churches to advocate against it. Tucker Carlson, characteristically unrestrained, said the amendment constituted “encouraging people to kill their own kids.”
Fifty-seven percent of Ohioans didn’t buy what the GOP and its Christian right allies were selling and voted to make abortion a state constitutional right. Rather than admit defeat, though, Republicans in the Ohio legislature promptly got to work devising ways to reverse the will of the voters, including a proposal to strip courts of jurisdiction to review the amendment. Missouri Republicans, led by gubernatorial candidate and Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, are attempting to add language to abortion rights ballot measures for 2024 that would falsely describe them as permitting “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth, without requiring a medical license or potentially being subject to medical malpractice.” These are not actions of lawmakers seeking consensus, compromise or reasonableness. These are the actions of ardent opponents of democracy and human rights.
Top national Republicans can use words like “nuanced” and “reasonable” and “consensus” as much as they like. But when it comes to what their party really wants, their actions drown out their words.
Sarah Posner
Sarah Posner is the author of "Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind."