Both sides of abortion fight gear up for new landscape
While terms of conflict have been set for years, supporters, opponents face new ground rules
The Supreme Court’s reversal of the 50-year-old decision in Roe v. Wade transformed the debate and politics around abortion in the United States, shifting battles to state courts and legislatures — and galvanizing a fresh wave of voters in the midterm elections who turned out forcefully.
While the terms of the abortion conflict had been set for decades, the results of the elections so closely following the court’s decision now have both sides reevaluating their strengths, weaknesses and strategies. Heading into the new legislative sessions next year, supporters and opponents of abortion rights are girding for fresh combat, with new ground rules, new opponents and new battlefronts.
Anti-abortion groups are pulling back from ballot initiatives as a way to restrict abortion, having failed with those measures in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana. Instead, they’re pushing to reinforce abortion restrictions where they’ve had success or hold the majority: in sympathetic court jurisdictions and legislatures.
Abortion rights advocates are coming out of the midterms with momentum. But for all their victories, they face the steeper challenge. With abortion now illegal or inaccessible in roughly half the country, they have to keep their supporters energized for a long fight.
After winning six out of six ballot initiatives this year, abortion rights supporters are pressing for more, especially in states such as Ohio and Missouri where the legislatures are gerrymandered and staunchly anti-abortion. Yet ballot initiatives aren’t an option in every state.
The path to restoring abortion rights still runs largely through state legislatures, where it has traditionally been harder to mobilize voters and donors.
“Now more than ever, I think our supporters and voters in general feel they have a role to play in protecting abortion access,” said Sarah Standiford, the national campaigns director for Planned Parenthood. When the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning the national right to abortion leaked in May, she said, many supporters felt there was nothing they could do. Now, she said, “the imperative is to really engage individuals in a way that they not only feel less helpless but are less helpless.”
The anti-abortion side is not stepping back from the fight either. Last month, anti-abortion groups filed suit in federal court in Texas, seeking to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of abortion pills.
At a meeting of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers outside Dallas after the election, Sue Liebel, the director of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion group, steered the lawmakers in the audience away from more ballot initiatives. Instead, she encouraged them to focus their energy in upcoming legislative sessions.
Liebel recognized a new state of play after the midterms, noting that the end of Roe v. Wade had brought a new cohort of defenders of abortion that anti-abortion groups were not used to having to counteract — in particular, representatives of hospitals, who publicly complained that new state prohibitions on abortion were interfering with medical care.