Abortion Activists Are Winning

By Khaleda Rahman

On December 27, 2023

In the 18 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, sending the issue of abortion to the states, abortion rights supporters have won time and time again.

Most recently, voters in the increasingly Republican-leaning state of Ohio resoundingly approved an amendment to the state constitution to protect abortion access. Though Ohio was the only state with an abortion question on the ballot in 2023, it is now the seventh—after California, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Michigan and Vermont—where voters have sided in favor of abortion rights since Roe‘s demise.

Abortion rights activists are hoping to continue the winning streak and have been gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to place similar referendums on the ballot in November 2024, including in crucial swing states such as Arizona, Florida and Nevada.

Democrats successfully harnessed outrage over Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, to perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 midterms, and have made clear they want to make abortion central in next year’s races for the White House and down the ballot.

Vice President Kamala Harris has announced a nationwide tour of events focused on the “fight for reproductive freedoms” beginning January 22—what would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe.

“I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body — not the government,” Harris said in a statement.

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe, “awoke a groundswell of outrage of people who didn’t want to see this basic human right get taken away,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, the executive director of Urge: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, told Newsweek.

“That outrage translated into turnout at the polls,” McGuire said. And in every state where abortion was on the ballot, she said people “came out in droves and were so clear [that] abortion should not be a crime.”

The series of victories shows that abortion “is a winning and popular issue,” she added. “The message to any politician who has been an abortion supporter, but not vocal… is speak up.”

Anti-abortion groups, though disappointed by the losses, say they remain undeterred and are gearing up to continue to fight in 2024.

“We’ve been at this for 50 years, we know it is a long game,” Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told Newsweek.

It’s “very much a marathon, not a sprint,” added Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.

But abortion has become a growing election liability for Republicans, and a series of defeats has left the GOP without an effective message on the issue going into 2024.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin‘s proposal for a “reasonable” ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest and the health of the mother—viewed as a national litmus test for Republicans—was rejected when voters handed control of the state legislature to Democrats in November.

Anti-abortion groups are wary of how Republican lawmakers and candidates are handling the issue.

Abortion is not a losing issue for Republicans, Hawkins said. “Running away from the Republican Party’s pro-life convictions, that’s the loser,” she said.

Last month, SBA Pro-Life America, one of the country’s biggest anti-abortion groups, warned in a memo that Democrats were massively outspending Republicans on abortion. The memo urged Republicans not to heed claims that the defeats at the ballot box mean they should abandon the issue to win in 2024, and called on the GOP to “define where it stands on the issue nationally.”

Former president Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, has repeatedly bragged that his Supreme Court appointments were key to overturning Roe, but more recently has sought to distance himself from strict abortion bans. In a September interview, he said Republicans “speak very inarticulately” about abortion and criticized those who support abortion bans without exceptions.

Popular opinion has shifted in the aftermath of Dobbs, said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law and a leading historian on the abortion debate.

“There’s evidence that that’s especially true in states that are experiencing criminal bans,” she told Newsweek. “That the reality of criminal bans is maybe potentially different than people imagined in sort of more abstract statements about right to life or protecting unborn babies.”

Trump, the likely Republican nominee, will try “to play down the significance of the abortion issue” during the 2024 campaign, Ziegler said. “I think you’re going to try to see the Biden campaign try to make abortion a major issue. I think the question is whether they can effectively explain what Trump could do [on abortion] without Congress.”

Tobias acknowledged that “smart thing” for Republican candidates to do would be to say they support abortion in cases of rape, incest or where the mother’s life is at risk.

“They should just be very upfront that that’s where the American public is,” she said.

But she added: “If we’re going to save most babies, then we will look for other ways to save the children that the law does not protect.”

Conservatives and anti-abortion groups have turned to the courts and tested other tactics in a bid to keep abortion off the ballot next year. Several groups in states including Arizona, Florida and Nevada are buying television and digital ads, knocking on doors, and holding events to convince people to not sign petitions to put the issue to voters, Politico reported.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in states such as Missouri and Oklahoma are working to make it harder for abortion-related measures to make it to the ballot, and also raise the threshold needed for an amendment to pass, a tactic that failed in Ohio.

Nicole Hunt, a spokesperson for Focus on the Family, called on lawmakers in other states to follow that lead and work to raise the threshold to amend state constitutions from a simple majority to 60 percent of the statewide vote.

Lawmakers “should consider tightening up procedures now to amend the state constitution so that amendments that have the significant majority of the voting electorate are passed,” Hunt said. “For example, Ohio considered an amendment to lift the voting threshold from a simple 50 percent plus one to 60 percent. And that effort failed, but had that effort been successful in Ohio, the abortion amendment would have failed.”

In some states, abortion rights supporters will face those additional hurdles, Ziegler said. In Florida, there is both a high signature requirement to put measures on the ballot and voters need to clear a 60 percent threshold to amend the state constitution.

The problem for anti-abortion groups is that what they want—a ban on all abortions from the moment of fertilization—”is not what voters want,” Ziegler said.

She noted that many anti-abortion groups had decried Roe as anti-democratic.

“Once voters had the chance to decide, it became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that pro-life or anti-abortion groups weren’t focusing on the will of voters, they were focusing on fetal protection.

“I think the movement has a real fundamental dilemma right now about whether it’s trying to win the hearts and minds of voters or whether it sees voters as secondary to protection of fetuses or unborn children, and then tries to find ways to take the question out of voters hands.”

McGuire said the anti-abortion movement is increasingly turning to “undemocratic” measures, including by purging voters ahead of elections.

“Anti-abortion extremists are so afraid of democracy, and it’s showing,” McGuire said. “They know that they can only win if they put a stranglehold on democracy. We saw this in Ohio, when they tried to change the rules and dilute and diminish the power of voters.”

The good news for those who support abortion rights, according to McGuire, is that higher turnout usually means victory.

“The numbers are on our side, right?” she said. “More young people, more women, more first-time voters, more people of color… When more people vote, we win on abortion.”

This piece was republished from News Week.