a bipartisan abortion rights bill has a lot of pro-choice opponents, explained
(and other thoughts on where we're at post-Dobbs/pre-midterms)
Readers of this newsletter know I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about abortion politics this year, and it feels like August is the month when many who were on the fence about whether this whole overturn Roe v. Wade thing would be a “big deal” are now nodding their heads slowly yes. Welcome.
Americans by and large think this is not a decision for the government to make, and that abortion should be a decision between a woman and her doctor. (This latter point is actually a more fraught position in an age of self-managed abortions, and feminist activists have long emphasized that messages about a “woman and her doctor” could diminish the reproductive agency of the pregnant woman herself. Still, for now, it remains of the most popular and broadly resonant messaging frames abortion rights advocates have.)
We’re seeing signs of how this is all playing out. The Kansas ballot initiative win on August 2nd really got people’s notice. Nearly 60 percent of voters upheld abortion rights in that Republican state. This week, attention is on a special election in an upstate New York swing district; Democratic candidate Pat Ryan won on Tuesday, and he campaigned hard on abortion rights. His opponent largely ignored the topic, but Ryan made it central. This 30-second ad of his is really worth watching:
Special elections are tricky things to draw broader lessons from, since turnout is always much lower than in a general election. But Democrats have been exceeding expectations in special elections since June, which is a positive sign for the party for November. In the boring-but-still-true rule of politics, the midterms will come down to turnout.
Anyway the politics on this is changing in ways that are really hard to predict, and I’m with those who are urging some humility with their punditry.
But, for what it’s worth, this week a video went viral of a South Carolina legislator sharing how he hadn’t expected the horrible consequences of the “fetal heartbeat” bill he voted for, which has now been in effect for 6+ weeks. The video is pretty stunning, and some people online were very understandably angry and exasperated with him, since many of the things he’s “realized” about his vote were warned about and predictable. Still, I think it’s a very important development. These GOP lawmakers re-evaluating past harmful votes and modifying their positions is what securing rights politically post Roe requires. What an individual state legislator thought simply mattered less when there was a federal constitutional protection.
In another sign of how the politics are changing, today reporters noted that Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters quietly toned down the abortion policy section on his campaign website. Can see that here:
This all brings to my new story — a look at a bipartisan bill in the Senate called the Reproductive Freedom for All Act. (Not to be confused with the Republican-only Reproductive Choice Act, or the Democratic-backed Women’s Health Protection Act.) It’s sponsored by Democrats Tim Kaine and Kyrsten Sinema, and Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.
The Reproductive Freedom for All Act is opposed by most Senate Democrats and virtually all reproductive health groups for various reasons that I explore in the piece. Some of the reasons are more legitimate than others, like one objection is that the bill would get challenged in court and reviewed by the same judges who just threw out Roe. But so would the bill the groups are pushing for, The Women’s Health Protection Act.
And activists point to the fact that 47 Republican Senators signed amicus briefs in support of overturning Roe as evidence that Republicans should not be seen as possible partners on bipartisan abortion legislation in the way that Democrats were able to find Republicans to work with on guns and infrastructure. I think certainly before the November midterms that’s very likely true, but as we’re seeing with these special elections and even Blake Masters’s campaign and that South Carolina lawmaker, there’s a lot of movement/regrouping/looking-over-one’s-shoulder/ happening right now, and I would not be making bets on what kind of coalition could or couldn’t be made six months or a year from now.
I think it makes complete sense why advocates have been mobilizing for their own ambitious bill in this moment, though I find the hostility they’ve given to this more moderate bill also disconcerting. Advocates don’t want to waste a crisis, as the saying goes, and they see an opportunity to push for something better than existed on June 23, 2022, the day before the Dobbs decision came down. That’s very understandable, even though upholding any federal legislation with this Supreme Court is going to be tough. But I also am very aware that we have no federal abortion rights right now, and that a state like Kansas, which has both a state constitutional right to abortion and many state abortion restrictions, the kind that could withstand the frustrating “undue burden” standard, is also widely seen as a huge lifeline for millions of people. So it’s tricky. The choices will likely look different, or perhaps be clearer, after November.
I worked hard to clarify what is going on right now when it comes to federal abortion policy and politics and hope you’ll check it out. You can read it here.
Thanks for reading, and keeping me in the loop on what I should be paying attention to.