Florida Republicans risk backlash if they ban abortions

For 49 years, it has remained their great unconsummated promise. Rightwing politicians assured conservative evangelical voters that, if elected, they’d fight a holy war to end abortion. They’d say it at press conferences, repeat it in campaign speeches. They’d cast votes in favor of anti-abortion legislation.

But most of that was just political theater, performed for a fervent minority. Candidates courting anti-abortion voters knew that even if their bills passed, there’d be no real effect. Roe v. Wade blocked the way, which meant that Roe v. Wade allowed politicians to humor anti-abortion activists without provoking much of a backlash from a pro-choice majority

But by June, the constitutional bulwark between promise and reality may well be dismantled. Suddenly, state legislators who’ve concocted legislation to ban or limit abortion will be held accountable for undoing what a preponderance of Americans consider a basic right. Their once-inconsequential anti-abortion bluster will likely be recycled in opponents’ attack ads.

The tenor of the questions asked by the U.S. Supreme Court’s very conservative majority on Dec. 1, when they heard oral arguments in a challenge to a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks, signals that the Court might issue a decision that would go much further than upholding that particular state law. The decision expected in June, will likely toss Roe altogether and reject the notion that abortion is protected by the U.S. Constitution. Abortion regulation will be left to individual state legislatures.

Just the anticipation that Roe was doomed has inspired an avalanche of legislation. Last year, Republican-controlled legislatures in 19 states enacted 108 laws restricting or essentially outlawing abortions. Under Roe v. Wade, most of those efforts would have been nullified in the federal courts. Without Roe, state bans and restrictions become law.

The Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health policy think tank, predicted that

“if Roe were overturned or fundamentally weakened,” 21 states, including Florida, would enact bans or harsh restrictions “as quickly as possible.”

The Florida Legislature currently has two anti-abortion bills under consideration. The less radical of the two would reduce the gestation period for a permissible abortion from 24 to 15 weeks, with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. It seems likely to pass.

The other was modeled after a Texas law that would defer enforcement to private citizens, rather than government agents, allowing those individuals to sue abortion providers or anyone else who helped a women end her pregnancy after a six-week limit (too soon for most women to even realize they’re pregnant). So far, this measure hasn’t gained traction in the Florida Legislature, but if the Texas law survives judicial scrutiny, that could change.

Republican strategists must secretly be worried that either bill could provoke a backlash. Particularly, in swing states like Florida, when it dawns on women that Republicans have erased a fundamental right, there could be hell to pay.

Who knows? Maybe those famously lazy young Democratic voters will be angry enough to show up in a non-presidential election. Maybe young women, and their mothers, will react with the kind of fervor once demonstrated by anti-abortionists. (Though hopefully without the bombings, arsons and shootings committed by anti-abortion extremists over the last four decades, including 11 murders that rendered the term “pro-life” a bloody oxymoron.)

The polls can’t be comforting for Republicans. A survey conducted in October by Lake Research and Emerson College Polling found that 66% of Democrats, compared to 45% of Republicans, would be more motivated to vote in the midterms if the Supreme Court tosses Roe.

A national CNN poll taken two weeks ago found 68% of the respondents opposed overturning Roe. CNN reported that polls conducted by the network since 1989 have never found more than 36% in favor of jettisoning Roe. A Marquette Law School national poll released this past week found 72% opposed overturning Roe, compared to 28% who preferred that the Supreme Court do just that. (A more nuanced Gallup poll found that while only 20 percent of Americans favored a total ban on abortions, a plurality supported some unspecified restrictions.)

But these surveys were based on theoretical circumstances. The question hanging over the Republican Party is what happens when the theoretical translates into a Stasi-style, turn-in-your-neighbor abortion ban enforced by snitches suing to pocket “damages in the amount of at least $10,000.”

Or how voters, especially women voters, will react to a TV news interview of a tearful young rape victim, forced by a draconian Republican-sponsored state law to bear her attacker’s child.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred.

Fred Grimm