What the Pro-Life movement lost and won
It’s easy to say what a triumphant midterm election would have looked like for opponents of abortion.
The ballot initiative installing abortion rights into the Michigan Constitution would have failed. Prolife measures in Kentucky and Montana would have succeeded. And Republicans would have enjoyed a sweeping victory in both the Senate and the House, making talk of a “Roevember” backlash against the Dobbs decision obsolete.
In each case the reverse happened: The pro-life side lost every statewide ballot — in liberal California and Vermont as well as in the states just listed — and Republicans underperformed expectations. This has revived the summertime assumption that the Dobbs decision was a political disaster for the GOP. And it’s divided pro-lifers between optimists who think Republicans just need to learn how to message more effectively about abortion and pessimists who think the results revealed a movement “dead in the water,” to quote Aaron Renn.
When abortion wasn’t directly on the ballot, though, voters showed no inclination to punish politicians who backed abortion restrictions. Any prochoice swing to the Democrats was probably a matter of a couple of points in the overall vote for the House of Representatives; meanwhile, Republican governors who signed “heartbeat” legislation in Texas, Georgia and Ohio easily won reelection, and there was no dramatic backlash in red states that now restrict abortion.
In other words, Republicans in 2022 traded a larger margin in the House and maybe a Senate seat or two for a generational goal, the end of Roe v. Wade. And more than that, they demonstrated that many voters who might vote prochoice on an up-down ballot will also accept, for the time being, pro-life legislation in their states.
For a movement that’s clearly a moral minority, that’s an opportunity, not a death knell. Yes, blue and most purple states will remain pro-choice in almost any imaginable version of the 2020s, and some red states as well.
But the fact that abortion is illegal with exceptions in 13 states, while heartbeat laws survived a key political test in Georgia and Ohio, is hardly an abstract or Pyrrhic victory.
My colleagues at The Upshot recently reported on data indicating that these restrictions prevented about 10,000 abortions across the first two months following the Dobbs decision. Pro-life scholar Michael New has suggested the true figure is higher, based in part on abortion and birthrate data from Texas after passage of its 2021 heartbeat law. But even just the lower figure adds up to 60,000 fewer abortions in a post-Dobbs year, thousands of babies who will live because Roe was overturned.
From the pro-life movement’s perspective, nothing is more important than making sure that bloc holds up. Yes, you need effective swing-state strategies, and yes, the movement needs to push the national GOP toward a more capacious and generous family policy.
A somewhat cynical view of abortion politics, in 2022 and beyond, is that the pro-life movement can sustain its gains so long as voters are effectively distracted by other economic or cultural concerns.
Another view, though, looks at the muddle of American opinion and sees a lot of people who would like to live in a society that protects life in utero but think the full anti-abortion vision isn’t plausible.
That’s what the pro-life movement won for itself in this election, despite its more immediate defeats: a chance, in a big part of the country, to win some of these doubters to its side.