The Politics of Abortion

Republicans would rather have a root canal than talk about that issue.

Remember when Republicans were celebrating back in June 2022 what they saw as a big victory in the war over abortion rights in America? The Supreme Court had just overturned Roe v. Wade, sending the abortion issue to the states. If Republicans are still celebrating, that means just one thing — they haven’t been paying attention.

For a lot of Americans, abortion is a moral issue. They believe life begins at conception and to abort that life amounts to murder. But abortion is also a political issue — one that has been a loser for Republicans. 

Nothing energizes Democrats more than abortion (except maybe for Donald Trump himself). Whenever abortion is on the ballot, Democrats turn out to vote in big numbers. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, ballot measures that guarantee abortion rights have been approved everywhere they’ve shown up — and that includes in red states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and Ohio.

And last week, several abortion decisions provided more ammo for Democrats fighting the abortion battle. On Tuesday, a ruling by the Supreme Court in Arizona revived a 160-year-old near-total ban on abortion in a state that is one of a handful of key battlegrounds in the presidential election. As one news report put it, Arizona “is now effectively ground zero for abortion politics.”

One day earlier, the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling that clears the way for a six-week ban on abortion, a law Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed through the GOP-majority legislature. In a separate decision, the court approved a ballot initiative that, if passed, would undo the six-week ban and restore broad abortion rights in the state.

Florida has been reliably red in recent years — and probably will stay that way this time around. But with abortion on the ballot, you never know what might happen — the sunshine state just might be in play this year.

And Donald Trump posted a video on his social media site last week in which he said it should be up to each individual state to decide what to do about abortion. That wasn’t what pro-life conservatives wanted to hear. They wanted Trump to come out for a federal ban on abortion.