Comment: Republicans ought to think twice about path on abortion

By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post

It was the midnight of it all.

Last week, Repuublican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law prohibiting abortions after six weeks, a time at which — and it gets exhausting repeatedly pointing this out — many women do not even realize they are pregnant. He signed the bill late at night. He tweeted a photo of the signing at 11:04 p.m., when many potential onlookers would have already gone to bed. The next day, he gave a speech at Liberty University, and, according to news reports, he didn’t mention the bill at all.

Contrast this behavior to the celebration DeSantis launched last year when he codified a 15-week abortion ban for his state. That signing was held in the daylight hours, at a church, with fanfare. There were speakers and live media coverage. It was public and showy.

For all we know, the marking of the six-week ban was subdued because DeSantis had a sore throat, or an early flight, or he’s saving up his entire party budget for a massive future antiabortion rave. (I imagine it would be called “Heartbeat.” There would be a three-day waiting period before you’re allowed in, and the door prize would be pamphlets peddling bunk about abortions causing breast cancer.)

But how it appears from the outside is that DeSantis, a man rumored to be gearing up for a 2024 presidential run, has doubts that this new law will make him look good to a national electorate. In which case, he’s wise to pass the six-week ban under the cover of night, because Americans want access to abortion. They support it overwhelmingly. And it turns out that many conservative lawmakers either do not understand or do not care about that.

Or maybe they understand and care but just cannot stop themselves; perhaps because they view abortion as so morally wrong that they genuinely believe the imperative to ban it supersedes the imperative to listen to constituents. Or perhaps because abortion has been the biggest tool in conservative garden sheds for so long that they cannot stop using it to dig, even if it means burying themselves in a hole with policies that are bad for them politically and bad for others on a much more profound level.

In Iowa, rape victims used to be able to obtain government assistance for terminating their resulting pregnancies. The Republican attorney general’s office announced this month that it was pausing that practice, along with the practice of providing the morning-after pill — which is birth control, not an abortifacient — to victims of sexual assault. (Eighty-five percent of Iowans support access to abortion in cases of rape or incest, according to a Des Moines Register-Mediacom poll.)

Last month, the conservative legislature of Arkansas rejected an exception to the state’s near-complete abortion ban. The exception would have allowed for abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities that were incompatible with life — pregnancies where the infant would not survive past birth — but it didn’t make it out of committee. (Seventy-four percent of Arkansans indicated that they thought abortion should be legal if a pregnancy was no longer viable or would not develop into a live birth, according to polling from the University of Arkansas.)

On Friday, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., told NBC that if he were elected president, “I would literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation that they can get through Congress.” If this came to pass, Scott would be signing legislation that few Americans had asked for. (A February Gallup poll found that only 15 percent of Americans were interested in stricter laws nationwide.)

Who, exactly, is all this antiabortion legislation for? Are laws meant to glorify a subjective concept of godly morality, or to govern actual human people? Are they meant to be measured, thoughtful and protective, or are they meant to be punitive, frenzied, showboating?

When Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, I heard the same analogy used again and again: Conservatives had been chasing the tail of abortion for years. The Republican Party was the dog, abortion was the tail, and for decades the party’s elected officials had spun the party base into dizzying circles using the promise that overturning Roe was nearly within reach. So, once the tail had been caught, in the form of the Dobbs decision, what were Republicans going to do about it? Were they going to allow abortion to truly belong to the states and the people who lived in them; developing laws based on the wills of Iowans, Arkansans, Idahoans, New Yorkers? Were they going to focus on passing widespread legislation improving maternal health and making it easier for families to increase their size? Universal day care? Expanded child tax credits?

No. It turns out that, having caught their own tails in their own mouths, conservatives are just going to keep chomping until they eat their own butts.

Because it turns out that the decades-long polling finding that Americans support access to abortion was correct all along, and Americans support access to abortion.

It turns out they support it in Wisconsin, where, earlier this month, liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the state’s Supreme Court by a hefty 11 percentage points. She had campaigned on a promise to overturn the state’s 1849 abortion ban, which had gone into effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

It turns out they support it in Michigan, where Democrat Gretchen Whitmer was reelected governor in November, after explicitly tying abortion access to the economic welfare of the state.

It turns out they support it in Kansas, where voters rejected a ballot measure that would have made abortion illegal, and they support it in Kentucky, where voters rejected a ballot measure that would have amended the state’s constitution to say that it does not “secure or protect a right” to abortion. They support it in Vermont, where voters added the protection of “reproductive autonomy” to the state’s constitution, and increasingly they appear to support it in Louisiana, where recent polls have shown support for abortion growing over the years; even while Louisiana’s legislature last year banned almost all abortion access.

I’ve seen some pundits predict, overconfidently, that all of this unwanted antiabortion legislation will result in a blue tsunami, one that will send the House of Representatives back under Democrats’ control and usher in a new term for Joe Biden. I’m not going to predict that. Elections are capricious, gerrymandering is real, anger is difficult to sustain. I’ll leave the punditry to actual political scientists, who are still wrong half the time.

What I am saying is very specifically this:

If you find yourself quietly slipping in your antiabortion legislation at 11 p.m. when nobody is around to make you defend it, you might wonder whether it is in fact indefensible.

If you find yourself proposing measures that are overwhelmingly disapproved of by the people you represent, you might wonder just whom you are representing at all. You might wonder what you stand for. Who you stand for. What you actually care about. What you are doing, or trying to.

I’m not saying that the 2024 election is going to hand Republicans’ butts to them. I’m saying the tail is gone, and they’re already eating their butts themselves.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. She’s the author of several novels, most recently, “They Went Left.” Follow her on Twitter @MonicaHesse.