Republicans in the US risk painting their party into a corner over abortion as conservative states plough ahead with increasingly draconian restrictions that are proving deeply unpopular with voters.
By overturning Roe vs Wade last year, the Supreme Court left it up to states to decide how they want to regulate abortion. That has touched off a flurry of high-profile moves to curb the procedure, the latest of which has come from Florida, where the state’s House of Representatives voted on Thursday to ban abortions past six weeks of pregnancy.
Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor and likely Republican presidential candidate, quickly signed it into law, representing a dramatic escalation in states’ war on abortion — Florida is one of the most populous in the country and a medical hub for much of the south-east.
For anti-abortion activists, it has been the fulfilment of a long-sought goal that Republican candidates have put at the centre of their campaigns for years. Some Republicans have also leveraged their opposition to abortion rights to win intraparty primary contests. But now, party donors and strategist are growing fearful these measures could backfire in general election contests against Democrats.
“It’s an issue where Republicans have a lot of weaknesses and they haven’t done anything over the last few months to address those weaknesses,” said Kyle Kondik, of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
Since Roe was overturned, liberals and moderates in Kansas, Michigan and Kentucky have handed defeats to opponents of abortion at the ballot box. Last week in Wisconsin, a Democratic-backed candidate for the state Supreme Court beat her conservative opponent by a double-digit margin. The liberal judge, Janet Protasiewicz, had made support for abortion rights a central part of her campaign, in a vote that was widely seen as a bellwether for voter sentiment on the issue.
David Tamasi, a Republican fundraiser and managing director at Chartwell Strategy Group, a Washington consultancy, said Republicans had “terrible messaging on it from the beginning”.
“No one likes being told by someone else what to do with their body, particularly a woman by a man — that’s the underlying challenge,” he said.
The onslaught against abortion rights has come not just from state lawmakers. Last week a federal judge in Texas, who was appointed to the bench by former president Donald Trump, overturned the two-decade old approval of mifepristone, the abortion drug, by the Food and Drug Administration. While an appeals court on Wednesday ruled that the pill should remain available across US, it still imposed restrictions on how it could be accessed.
Democrats have seized on the rulings to criticise courts shaped by conservative judges appointed by Republican presidents. Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, blasted the appeals court that ruled on the abortion pill as being dominated by extremists “putting their own anti-choice opinions before the medical expertise of providers and the FDA and the interests of patients”.
“If this decision stands, no medication — from chemotherapy drugs, to asthma medicine, to blood pressure pills, to insulin — would be safe from attacks,” warned vice-president Kamala Harris.
So far, Republicans have broached the subject awkwardly, if at all. “I think that this kind of thing is going to make a big difference, just optically, in 2024,” said one veteran Republican fundraiser in Texas. On top of the adverse political impact for his party, he worried that it could also make conservative states less attractive for business.
“You tell me one company — major company — particularly in the north-east that, when the husband comes home to Greenwich and says: ‘We’re moving our headquarters to Houston’, the wife is going to say, ‘Okay, let’s do it’,” he said.
Some Republican presidential hopefuls are also finding it difficult to formulate their approach as they aim to appeal to party hardliners to win the primary while avoiding extremist positions that could turn off voters in the general election.
Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina who is exploring a White House run next year, was asked on Wednesday in a CBS interview if he would support a national abortion ban at 15 weeks of pregnancy, as proposed by fellow Republican senator Lindsey Graham. He dodged the question, saying simply said he was “100 per cent pro-life”.
By Thursday, speaking to media in New Hampshire, Scott said he would back a 20-week ban nationally — a far cry from the absolute or near-absolute curbs being advanced in many Republican-led states. He also sought to depict Democrats as extremist on the other side.
“The big problem that we see today is that our Democrats want to make this a federal issue of having abortions into the third trimester,” Scott said. “That is something that puts us in the company of China and North Korea.”
Nancy Mace, a member of Congress from South Carolina, has been one of the few Republicans to publicly criticise her party’s stance on abortion. “This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of,” Mace told CNN last weekend. “We have, over the last nine months, not shown compassion towards women, and this is one of those issues that I’ve tried to lead on as someone who’s ‘pro-life’ and just have some common sense.”
Some Republicans point to the fact that some state governors such as Brian Kemp in Georgia, Mike DeWine in Ohio, and even DeSantis in Florida, cruised to re-election last year despite their support for tighter abortion restrictions. But in other states, such as Michigan, and in congressional races across the country, Democrats were energised in opposition to the overturning of abortion rights in the 2022 midterm elections, helping them outperform expectations. The effect was particularly notable in a number of swing suburban areas that could be pivotal in 2024.
“Voters may be discouraged by the loss of their rights but they are not staying home,” said Christina Reynolds, vice-president for communications at Emily’s List, the abortion rights group in Washington. “We knew that abortion had an impact on voters, and what we’ve seen since 2022 is that Republicans have not learned that lesson.”
