Democrats seek to make GOP pay for threats to reproductive rights
Democrat Lucas Kunce is trying to pin reproductive care restrictions on Sen. Josh Hawley, R-missouri, betting it will boost his chances of unseating the incumbent in November.
In a recent ad campaign, Kunce accuses Hawley of jeopardizing reproductive care, including in vitro fertilization. Staring straight into the camera, with tears in her eyes, a Missouri mom identified only as Jessica recounts how she struggled for years to conceive.
“Now there are efforts to ban IVF, and Josh Hawley got them started,” Jessica said. “I want Josh Hawley to look me in the eye and tell me that I can’t have the child that I deserve.”
Never mind that IVF is legal in Missouri, or that Hawley has said he supports limited access to abortion. In key races across the country, Democrats are branding their Republican rivals as threats to women’s health after a broad erosion of reproductive rights since the Supreme Court struck down
Roe v. Wade, including near-total state abortion bans, efforts to restrict medication abortion, and a court ruling that limited IVF in Alabama.
On top of the messaging campaigns, Democrats hope ballot measures to guarantee abortion rights in as many as 13 states – including Missouri, Arizona, and Florida – will help boost turnout in their favor.
The issue puts the GOP on the defensive, said J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst at the University of Virginia.
“I don’t really think Republicans have found a great way to respond to it yet,” he said.
Abortion is such a salient issue in Arizona, for example, that election analysts say a U.S. House seat occupied by Republican Juan Ciscomani is now a tossup.
Hawley appears in less peril, for now. He holds a wide lead in polls, though Kunce outraised him in the most recent quarter, raking in $2.25 million in donations compared with the incumbent’s $846,000, according to campaign finance reports. Still, Hawley’s war chest is more than twice the size of
Kunce’s.
Kunce, a Marine veteran and antitrust advocate, said he likes his odds.
“I just don’t think we’re gonna lose,” he told KFF Health News. “Missourians want freedom and the ability to control their own lives.”
Hawley’s campaign declined to comment. He has backed a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks and has said he supports exceptions for rape and incest and to protect the lives of pregnant women. Missouri’s state ban is near total, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
“This is Josh Hawley’s life’s mission. It’s his family’s business,” Kunce said, a nod to Erin Morrow Hawley, the senator’s wife, a lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court in
March on behalf of activists who sought to limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
State abortion rights have won out everywhere they’ve been on the ballot since the end of Roe in 2022, including in Republican-led Kentucky and Ohio.
An abortion rights ballot initiative is also expected in Montana, where a Republican challenge to Democrat Jon Tester could decide control of the Senate.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF– the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.