The results of the latest election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade are in.
Once again, abortion rights proved to be the most potent issue across the nation, in red states, blue states, and across all levels of government. Pundits proclaimed that the Republicans’ attempt to reboot their abortion messaging failed and announced that in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, the party would have to search for different ways to mask their long-held goal to ban abortion.
But the problem is not their messaging. It’s their mission.
In the five decades since Roe, Republicans have tried again and again to enact a nationwide abortion ban. When it became clear they wouldn’t be successful in getting legislation through Congress, they weaponized the courts by seating unelected judges who ruled in their favor. In recent years, Donald Trump emboldened their efforts by using inflammatory language about abortion and appointing not one but three justices to the Supreme Court whose anti-choice record he brazenly bragged about.
The issue is that after the Supreme Court stripped away Americans’ fundamental right to health care that includes abortion – a right they had for nearly 50 years – the people want it back. A wide swath of voters across the political and socioeconomic spectrum, from Kansas to Kentucky to Ohio, have consistently said that people, not politicians, should have the freedom to make their own health care decisions, including about abortion.
Ever since Roe was decided in 1973, the Republican Party has falsely branded itself as “pro-life,” and politicians have reflexively voted for every restriction and extreme ban their anti-choice colleagues put in front of them. In recent Congresses, they have introduced bill after bill to ban abortions entirely, impose harsh new restrictions, or punish providers and spread harmful disinformation about abortion care.
The newly-minted House speaker has not only sponsored a bill that would effectively ban all abortions from the time of conception but has openly called for abortion providers to be “imprisoned at hard labor.” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, whose state just voted to codify abortion rights in its Constitution this week, has called for a complete ban on abortion with no exceptions, calling exceptions such as rape and incest “inconvenient” because “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
The GOP’s anti-choice goals extend beyond abortion. Virtually every Republican in Congress has voted for legislation that would ban medication abortion and bills that would ban certain forms of birth control. Just last Congress, House Republicans overwhelmingly opposed a bill protecting Americans’ right to access contraception!
After the 2022 midterm election, any Republican who could read a poll was worried. Some, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, started coming up with restrictions on abortion that they thought would be politically popular. What they and others in their party fail to grasp is that abortion policy is not some abstract political idea or a convenient talking point. Arbitrary timelines affect real people every day – people who are suffering miscarriages, who have survived assault, whose pregnancies have gone undetected, and whose doctors are afraid to provide care due to the threat of criminal prosecution.
As their hardline messaging failed, many Republican politicians have decided to tone down their rhetoric – to argue for “common sense limits,” as if they know better than doctors and their own constituents all the circumstances that can impact pregnancies and their families. Meanwhile, others have decided to just not talk about the issue at all. Their problem is that, pre-Dobbs, they talked about it and voted on it a lot in order to mollify their extreme base. And now it’s coming back to haunt them.
Without Roe as a backstop against the radical bans and restrictions endorsed by extremist legislators and judges, America’s pro-choice majority is seeing those harmful policies for what they truly are. And that majority will be heard.
Donald Trump cannot avoid the consequences of his actions. The Republicans clamoring for his support by doing his bidding cannot avoid theirs either. In 2024, Republican candidates will suffer the effects of decades of pandering to their extreme anti-choice members. Messaging will not solve their problem, especially when their record speaks for itself. If the results in Ohio and elsewhere have shown us anything, it’s that abortion remains a top issue for voters, and their anger over Republican attempts to ban it has not abated one bit. If anything, it only continues to grow.
Abortion will be a game-changer up and down the ballot until we finally do what the people are demanding: protect their right to reproductive freedom by passing federal legislation that once again makes Roe v. Wade the law of the land.
U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette represents Colorado’s First Congressional District and is serving her 14th term in Congress. She is co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus.
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