Abortion Bans Are Unpopular. Republicans Know It.

They stay silent, or say one thing and legislate another.

Christopher J. Clayton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The GOP presidential primary is picking up steam, and the candidates are being remarkably cagey on what should have been the biggest conservative win of the last half-century: Stacking the Supreme Court with far-right judges who granted the great Republican wish of overturning Roe v. Wade and ending the era of safe, legal abortion for American women.

And yet, when it comes to talking about abortion on the various Republican campaign trails, there’s very little in the way of horn-tooting. Instead, there’s broad silence.

That’s because the mostly-men running for the Republican nomination know that the very policies they push are broadly unpopular. That’s not going to stop them from continuing to push and pass unpopular, dangerous, and deleterious policies, of course, but it will stop them from talking about it.

Ron DeSantis, for example, was in New Hampshire this week, dodging questions about abortion rights and the six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida. When asked if he supports an abortion policy that would allow for the procedure at any point in pregnancy — even, ostensibly, very early — DeSantis didn’t answer, instead saying:

“So my wife has a fatherhood initiative,” he replied. “We’ve also done a lot of stuff to help new mothers, like we now have a year of postpartum health coverage for poor mothers. Obviously, we have the educational choice and a bunch of stuff that we’ve done.”

“My wife has a fatherhood initiative” in response to a question about reproductive choice tells you just about everything you need to know about how much DeSantis, and Republicans more broadly, care about parenthood, even as they attempt to mandate it. DeSantis, a father himself, can find the time to ban abortion, but efforts to get dads involved in the lives of children women are now forced to bear gets pushed off onto Florida’s first lady.

And, if he were elected, would DeSantis support a nationwide ban on abortion, which is what the anti-abortion movement wants? He won’t say.

Donald Trump, the one candidate who has crowed about his role in overturning Roe, is similarly cagey when it comes to a national ban. Now, look, Trump is not someone whose word you can trust ,and we all know that he says one thing and does another — or says one thing one minute and another the next, depending on who he thinks he’s scamming and how he thinks it plays out for him. But he has criticized DeSantis’s six-week ban in Florida, characterizing it as too extreme. According to one of his several conflicting statements, he’s said that the abortion issue should be squarely where the GOP has long said it should be: Back in state legislatures. That is, of course, wholly unacceptable to the anti-abortion movement, who spent decades arguing that the Supreme Court should turn the issue back to the states, and now contend that the states should have no power at all (unless they’re banning abortion), and that the federal government should step in and ban the procedure for every person in America.

Of course, just a few years ago Trump suggested that women who have abortions should go to prison, so I’m not sure I’d trust this most recent change of heart.

Tim Scott responds to questions about abortion by calling himself “100% pro-life,” but then won’t answer when asked if he would ban abortion at six weeks, or 12, or 15 (“I’m not going to talk about six or five or seven or 10.”). He has in the past signed onto legislation that would outlaw abortion entirely, and could possibly outlaw IVF and criminalize miscarriages.

Nikki Haley similarly won’t say whether she would sign a national abortion ban; when it comes to how many weeks into a pregnancy she would ban abortion, she says she won’t “get into that game” — as if the question were some kind of gotcha, instead of a real decision she may have to make as president.

When the Washington Post reached out to eight Republican primary contenders about their position on abortion rights, the only one to give a straight answer was Chris Christie (“I’ve always been pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother,” Christie told the Post in an emailed statement. “I believe these are decisions that should be made by governors, state legislatures and their citizens at the state level. The states, not the federal government, should be making these decisions.”).

Mike Pence’s team pointed to his history of extreme anti-abortion positions, including saying that he wants abortion banned in every state. Pence also cheered when a Texas judge went rogue and banned Mifepristone, an abortion-inducing medication.

As far as I can tell, none of the other candidates responded to the Post’s questions.

That’s for good reason: Banning abortion is really unpopular, including with Republican voters. Efforts to ban abortion have been knocked down from Kansas to Kentucky to Wisconsin. Abortion rights are predictably more popular in blue states and liberal enclaves, but a whole lot of Republican voters in red states also chafe when a right-wing government wants to tell them what to do with their uteruses.

This is perhaps made more acute by the horror stories coming out in our post-Roe nation, which make clear that abortion rights aren’t just necessary to protect the lives, health, and wellbeing of people seeking abortions (although that would be enough), but are necessary to protect the lives, health, and wellbeing of anyone who might get pregnant — who might have serious complications, who might have a fetus that cannot live, who might be a child, who might be a rape victim. Suddenly, a whole lot of people who may have believed that legal abortion wasn’t important because it wouldn’t affect them — the “abortion is morally wrong and I would never have one” people — are realizing that maybe they would have one if they needed it to save their life or preserve their health, and despite supposed life exceptions, in reality abortion bans mean that the pregnant woman’s life and health is subordinate to that of her fetus. Perhaps some conservative men are realizing that they love their female partners and don’t want to see them die or become grievously injured unnecessarily simply because they got pregnant.

Of course plenty of conservatives don’t care, some out of ignorance, some out of hubris, some out of religious orthodoxy, some of out misogynist vindictiveness. Elections, though, are often decided on the margins. Who turns out? Who is motivated? Who is turned off? The wrong answer on abortion, an issue that has skyrocketed in importance to voters since the Dobbs decision, could indeed decide who wins and who loses the general election, and is already shaping the GOP primary.

But don’t lose sight of the truth, even if Republican candidates won’t say it out loud: Every single one of them is more beholden to a far-right anti-abortion movement than they are to their more moderate voters, and not a single one of them would risk the ire of that movement by refusing to sign a national ban if it came across their desks.

xx Jill