The news for opponents of abortion, it seemed, couldn’t get much worse. Polls kept finding that most Americans favor legal abortion. Elections confirmed it. Republicans faced a dilemma: how to keep the loyalty of the pro-life minority without alienating the pro-choice public? A Post columnist summed it up: “The great abortion debate is over. … The antiabortion forces have been routed.”
That was Charles Krauthammer, writing a few weeks after the election of Bill Clinton in 1992. That year was a nadir for pro-life political fortunes, and other artifacts from it show a similar lack of prescience. That summer, three justices of the Supreme Court had issued a ruling that fantasized about the country’s coming together behind its reaffirmation of Roe v. Wade.
The politics of abortion have changed a lot since then. Most momentously, the court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last year. But some patterns of the abortion debate endure. For the entirety of the past five decades, there have been many polls that suggest most people favor legal abortion, at least in some cases. For almost all of that time, the conventional wisdom has held that Republican opposition to abortion was a liability for the party — and many Republican politicians and strategists have shared that view and run from the issue. Divisions about how to proceed, too, have been a constant feature of the pro-life movement.
We are hearing a similar message now: Abortion is a weight dragging down Republicans, the main reason they underperformed in the midterm elections, a danger to them in elections to come. The fact that previous versions of these analyses turned out not to tell us much about how the abortion debate would go does not prove the current ones wrong. The political obstacles to pro-life political ambitions are real, and this time could be different. But we should be on guard that some of the same forces that have led in the past to an overestimation of those obstacles — such as the overrepresentation of pro-choice sentiment among Americans with college degrees and among journalists — could again be at work.
The torrent of stories about setbacks for pro-lifers has made it oddly easy to lose sight of the most basic point about abortion policy over the last year: The pro-life side is making huge gains. The Supreme Court no longer claims that our most fundamental law requires that the killing of unborn children be treated as a nonevent. In 23 states, legislators have banned abortion after six weeks or earlier; two more have banned it after 12 weeks. (Some of these bans are tied up in court.) In those places that have enacted new laws protecting abortion access, on the other hand, abortion had not been restricted before; they have for the most part ratified the status quo.