PRO-LIFERS NEED TO RELEARN HOW TO BE STRATEGIC
The end of the year is a time to reflect on one’s mistakes, including, for a columnist, the arguments you got wrong. I am ruminating on my utter misreading of the politics of a post-Roe world.
“The left is counting on an abortion backlash that may never come,” I wrote in May 2022, after Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s draft decision overturning Roe leaked to Politico. Polling suggested most people were in what I once dubbed “the Muddle” — favoring neither total bans nor unfettered abortion access, and often conflicted about what should happen between the two poles.
Of course, hardcore minorities at either end of the spectrum had clear, strong preferences, but those people were already active voters, I pointed out, already strongly committed to one party or the other. The rest of the public cared, but not necessarily strongly enough to affect their voting behavior. As abortion law in every state settled down to something close to the median of public opinion, I thought the issue would probably cease to exert much political force.
I won’t say this is the wrongest I have ever been, given that I supported the Iraq War. But I have not been this wrong since I decided in 2016 to go on holiday after the election, because I thought there would be little worth covering in Hillary Clinton’s presidential transition.
Pro-lifers have been losing abortion referendums even in deep-red states. If you are a local Democratic official in a state that allows initiatives or referendums and you are not doing your best to put abortion somewhere on the 2024 ballot, then you are committing political malpractice.
So how did I get this one so wrong? Four reasons:
First, I was right that voter intensity on this issue mattered — but wrong about the distribution of intensity. A lot of people for whom this was a low priority as long as Roe was the law of the land apparently became a lot more intense once Roe fell — almost all of them on the pro-choice side.
Second, in abstract, many people were against abortion in all but the most sympathetic cases. But though they might not have admitted it to themselves, many of them also liked knowing women had the option — if not for themselves, then for their wives, daughters, sisters or girlfriends. When politicians threatened that option, they voted pragmatically.
Third, I failed to understand just how badly legislators had drafted many of the “trigger laws” that banned abortion as soon as Roe fell. Operating under the shelter of Roe, politicians had also been thinking symbolically, giving pro-life groups ultra-strict laws that couldn’t command support among even a majority of Republicans, with little concern for the practical details of carrying out those laws.
Which brings me to the fourth reason my prognostication failed: I underestimated how tactically inflexible the pro-life movement would be.
As a member of the Muddle, I’m sympathetic to those who feel every life is sacred and must be protected at all costs. But this feeling has made prolifers obsessed with ensuring no doctor ever performs a single unnecessary abortion. Unfortunately, the law is too blunt an instrument for such surgical precision.
Tell doctors they face severe sanctions for any abortion deemed less than perfectly necessary, and they will respond by refusing to do abortions in all but the clearest cases — which means forcing a lot of grieving women to carry nonviable pregnancies to term. Even if you can justify this morally, it cannot be justified politically.
This has surprised me more than anything, because pro-life activists used to be good at picking strategic battles, such as parental consent or bans on particularly gruesome procedures. If they truly want to reduce the numbers of abortions, they’ll need to return to those strategic roots. Otherwise — if I dare make another prediction — they will end up where I am now: watching pro-choice initiatives win in state after state, and wondering how they got it so wrong.