Commentary
On Aug. 8, a ballot measure in solidly red-state Ohio that would have made it more difficult to amend the state constitution to liberalize abortion access failed by an embarrassing landslide.
A mere
43 percent of Ohio voters cast their ballots in favor of the measure, known as Issue One, which would have required a supermajority of 60 percent of voters to approve future state constitutional amendments instead of the current simple majority.
The No votes cast by 57 percent of Ohio voters clear the path for easy passage of a measure on the November ballot in that state that would guarantee virtually unfettered access to abortion even after fetal viability, currently believed to be around 24 weeks. Some
58 percent of polled likely voters in Ohio already support that constitutional change.
The Ohio defeat for the pro-life movement came on top of a series of similar setbacks in a number of states in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and its creation of a federal constitutional right to abortion.
While about 20 states, mostly in the Republican-dominated South and Midwest, immediately put abortion restrictions into effect (some of those restrictions have been blocked by courts), elsewhere right-to-lifers failed abysmally.
In November 2022, voters in purple-state Michigan approved by 57 percent a state-constitutional right to “reproductive freedom” that included abortion along with contraception, sterilization, and fertility procedures. Voters in Kentucky rejected by a 52 percent margin a measure that would have barred judges from finding a right to abortion in that state’s constitution. Kansans rejected by a 59 percent margin a measure that would have nullified a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that its own constitution included a right to abortion. In swing-state Wisconsin in April, voters flipped the state supreme court from majority-conservative to majority-progressive by electing former Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat and vocal supporter of abortion rights.
Add to these defeats the fact that the much-heralded “red wave” of Republicans expected to sweep both houses of Congress in November 2022 never materialized. It had been assumed, right up until election eve, that galloping inflation and rising crime, two issues on which the GOP could hold the Democrats’ feet to the fire, would be voters’ deciding pivots. But it turned out that
women voters, who already skew Democratic and who constituted 52 percent of the turnout in November (to men’s 48 percent), were the deciders, and they decided that the
Dobbs decision was a greater threat than the
8 percent inflation jump between October 2021 and October 2022.
Media pundits were quick to blame the debacle on Republican support for state abortion restrictions, accusing GOP politicians of caving in to their far-right, often religiously motivated, constituencies. Furthermore, Republican presidents, most notably Donald Trump, had appointed the Dobbs Supreme Court majority that nullified Roe. Dobbs sent abortion back to the states for regulation—and it now seems that significant numbers of state-level voters don’t want the regulation that GOP lawmakers have proposed.
And now, even some hardline-conservative commentators are openly calling for the GOP to modify, place on the back burner, or perhaps entirely get rid of its pro-life-accommodating stance. On Aug. 9, after the Ohio debacle, Ann Coulter
wrote in a tweet, “By the time Republicans notice states keep voting IN FAVOR of abortion, there will be no elected Republicans left.”
Republicans are in a bind, because the party desperately needs its religiously conservative constituency that isn’t big enough to secure decisive victories at the ballot box. But the root of the problem isn’t Dobbs and the floodgates it supposedly opened. It’s Roe v. Wade itself.
What Roe did in 1973 wasn’t merely to create a federal constitutional right to an abortion: It nationalized the abortion issue. Before Roe, abortion was one of those matters that was universally considered to be entirely within states’ criminal-domain. The idea that it had federal constitutional aspects was unthinkable. Some states enacted laws banning the procedure except when a woman’s life was in jeopardy. Other states, such as California, Washington, and New York, liberalized their laws during the 1960s. Roe nullified every one of those laws—and suddenly it became a matter of national concern, with attending national movements—right-to-life on one side, reproductive-rights activism on the other.
Even ideological liberals, notably the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had criticized Roe for its whole-cloth creation of a federal constitutional right. So when the Supreme Court overturned Roe last year, pro-lifers assumed—naively—that the issue would return to its status of 50 years ago: a matter of individual state regulation in which liberals would enact liberal regimes (California, New York) and conservatives conservative regimes (Texas, Florida).
Instead, the opposite has happened. Every state in which a potential abortion restriction surfaces has become the subject of intense national scrutiny, mostly negative, with huge sums of money churning from national progressive bank accounts into the state in question, as happened in Ohio. The genie can’t be put back into the bottle.
What should the GOP do? The first thing is to recognize that the only way to defeat powerful national opponents is to stop pretending that
Dobbs simply made abortion a purely local concern and to enter the national game itself. That means coming up with an abortion stance that it can express robustly, maintaining the loyalty of its religious-right constituency but appealing to the rest of America. Polls show that
60 percent of Americans favor keeping most abortions legal. But the legal abortions they favor mostly occur within the first trimester of pregnancy.
People are repulsed by the barbarity of late-term procedures. So why not start with a proposal for federal legislation that would make the United States more like Europe: legal abortion up through 12 or 15 weeks, then a near-total ban? This would be a start in raising the national consciousness—and it would give the Republicans a chance to win elections.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
