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What We Learned about Abortion Politics This Year

What We Learned about Abortion Politics This Year

Last updated on: December 28, 2022 at 2:47 pm by Daniel K. Williams

What We Learned about Abortion Politics This Year 2022-12-28T14:47:51-04:00 Daniel K. Williams

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2022 was the most momentous year in the history of American abortion politics since 1973. It was the year that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the year that the strictest antiabortion laws in American history went into effect in several states. As of this month, near-total abortion bans are in effect in thirteen states, and highly restrictive laws have been passed in several others. That hasn’t happened in half a century.

2017 March for Life, Washington DC (Photo by James McNellis, Wikimedia Commons)

And yet the number of abortions occurring this year is likely to be almost the same as it was last year. According to the New York Times, the abortion rate this summer was only 6 percent lower than it was before Roe v. Wade was overturned.

And if the pro-life movement’s expectations for a dramatic decrease in the number of abortions were never realized, neither were the abortion rights movement’s apocalyptic fears of a return to a pre-Roe world in which women could not access abortion or their hopes that a public reaction against abortion restrictions would lead to Democratic political victories in states that enacted restrictive abortion laws.

Instead, what we learned this year is that all of the things that we should have known about abortion politics before the overturn of Roe v. Wade – that the country is divided on abortion along regional and religious lines, that there is no national consensus on the question, and that restrictive abortion laws are only marginally effective in reducing the abortion rate – are still true.

In particular, the abortion politics of the last six months, since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, have shown us that:

1) Evangelicals in rural parts of the Bible belt are still strongly opposed to abortion – but much of the rest of the United States is not. For decades, both the pro-life and the reproductive rights movements have focused heavily on national political strategies, and their ultimate vision has been a nation that has a uniform abortion policy – which is more or less what Roe v. Wade attempted to create. Both sides have dreamed that they might persuade the other.

Yet over the past decade, the evangelical-dominated Republican states of the South and rural Midwest or Mountain West and the Democratic states of the North and West Coast have moved much further apart in their policies on abortion and in abortion access. Forty-five years ago, abortion was about as easy to get in Birmingham, Alabama, as it was in Boston, Massachusetts, but in the early twenty-first century, targeted regulation of abortion providers in some conservative states made it much more difficult for residents of those states to access abortion. That is because white evangelical (and Hispanic evangelical) opposition to abortion has increased even as opposition to abortion among most other groups of Americans (with the prominent exception of conservative Catholics) has decreased. Currently, culturally conservative Catholics do not comprise a majority of the population in any state, but evangelicals do – which is why political opposition to abortion has gained ground in the regions with large percentages of white rural evangelicals.

The regional division on abortion is not simply a matter of Republican states versus Democratic ones or rural versus urban. Montana is a rural, strongly Republican state that voted for Trump over Biden in 2020 by a 16-point margin, but it is maintaining legal abortion. So is Kansas. To ban or heavily restrict abortion, a state has to be strongly socially conservative – which in most cases, means heavily evangelical (not just Republican). Montana is a Republican state, but it’s not a churchgoing state.

Of the seventeen states with the highest levels of “religiosity” (a score that the World Population Review assigns based on a combination of church attendance rates and responses to survey questions about religious belief and observance), all but two (North Carolina and Virginia) have moved to heavily restrict or ban abortion this year. And the primary reason that North Carolina and Virginia did not is because both states have had enough white urban professionals and African American voters to elect a sufficient number of Democrats who support keeping abortion legal.

Thus, to enact lasting abortion restrictions, a state has to have a high church attendance rate, a Republican majority, and a sizeable rural population. This limits the number of states that are likely to enact abortion bans. The small number of states that did not fit these criteria but that nevertheless tried to enact abortion restrictions (such as Arizona, for instance, which has an electorate that leans Republican but is not dominated by churchgoing evangelicals) experienced pushback from voters last month. Arizona voters sent Democrats to the US Senate and the governorship. Pennsylvania voters did the same.

The limited appeal of abortion restrictions outside of particular religious subcultures is partly due to the fact that the abortion rights movement has forged a broadly based coalition by successfully branding the campaign for maintaining abortion access as a social justice movement for the poor, a women’s rights movement for equality, a campaign for personal freedom, and a bulwark against religious control. In combination, those frameworks for the movement have widespread appeal that crosses party lines and unites libertarians from the Mountain West with social justice advocates from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Current abortion policies by state (Wikimedia Commons). Black = states with abortion bans in effect.

This suggests that outside of white evangelical strongholds (or, in the case of Utah and Idaho, LDS Church strongholds), abortion restrictions will have very limited traction. The events of this year demonstrate that the pro-life dream of a steadily expanding number of states willing to enact abortion restrictions is not likely to occur. Given the opposition to abortion restrictions even in Republican states that are not dominated by evangelicals, it is difficult to imagine how pro-lifers can get a majority of states to accept abortion bans – and if they can’t get voters to adopt bans at the state level, they certainly won’t be able to pass a ban at the national level.

This means that the pro-life dream of using the reversal of Roe v. Wade as a beachhead to enact restrictive abortion policies across the nation or secure a national abortion ban is almost certain to fail. There is no national momentum against abortion. Abortion restrictions are very popular in evangelical and conservative Catholic circles – and have very little support outside of those subcultures.

This is unfortunate, because the pro-life movement could have branded itself in a different way and appealed to some of the same social justice values that the abortion rights movement did. For much of the mid-to-late twentieth century, many pro-life activists who sympathized with the political left saw their cause as a social justice movement to help both the unborn and their mothers. But the movement’s alliance with the Republican Party and its stronghold in states that have opposed Medicaid expansion have undercut that claim and made it difficult for the movement to sustain its social justice message. And as a result, the pro-life movement has lost the support of social justice advocates who might, in other circumstances, have been more sympathetic to the movement’s ideals.

2) Because of evangelical support for the pro-life cause, voters in socially conservative, religious states continue to support Republican politicians who have enacted abortion bans even as voters in other parts of the country repudiate them. In the months leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats hoped that a platform of abortion rights might appeal to voters and enable them to defeat the politicians that had enacted restrictive abortion laws.

This strategy worked in states that had a limited number of evangelical voters, but across the South, the Republican politicians who supported abortion restrictions won resounding victories. In Georgia, Republican governor Brian Kemp, who had signed into law the state’s six-week ban, cruised to a reelection victory over Stacey Abrams, who made abortion a central issue in her campaign. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis, who had signed into law the state’s 15-week ban, won a resounding double-digit election victory over Charlie Crist. Republican candidates for governor and Senate won two-thirds of the vote in Alabama, a state that had just outlawed nearly all abortion. In Texas, which led the country in the push for abortion restrictions, Republican governor Greg Abbott defeated Beto O’Rourke with a comfortable 55 percent of the vote. Similar outcomes occurred in numerous other states that had passed abortion bans.

Perhaps some of the voters who supported these Republican candidates did so in spite of their stances on abortion, but even if that was the case, the 2022 midterm elections showed that in Bible belt states with strong contingents of rural evangelicals, politicians who support stringent abortion restrictions will not be punished at the polls. Abortion rights are not a winning issue in the Bible belt, as Stacey Abrams discovered.

This suggests that even as the pro-life cause loses ground in the rest of the country, abortion restrictions will likely remain in place in most of the states that have already passed them – and in some places, they may become more stringent.

3) However, even in rural states with socially conservative evangelical majorities, there is limited appetite for the sweeping abortion bans that many pro-life activists want – but there is still opposition to abortion. The pro-life movement’s most embarrassing loss at the polls this year was in Kentucky, where voters in a state that is heavily rural and evangelical voted against a referendum stating that the Kentucky constitution did not protect the right to an abortion. Kentucky already had an abortion ban in place, and for years, the state had had no more than one abortion clinic But voters rejected a measure that would have prevented a constitutional challenge to those bans – perhaps because some voters feared that the state legislature would use that vote as an opportunity to enact more comprehensive bans than they wanted.

The pro-life movement should remember what happened in Mississippi in 2011, when voters in a strongly socially conservative, antiabortion state defeated a referendum to ban abortion, because they feared that the measure might also prohibit certain fertility treatments and forms of birth control.

The result of abortion referendums in Kansas and Kentucky suggests that pro-life activists have likely overreached with some bans that provide no exceptions for rape or that leave some voters fearing that even treatments for miscarriage might be threatened. Even among many evangelicals in the Bible belt, opposition to abortion, while widespread, may not be quite as absolutist as many pro-life activists imagine. A Pew poll from May of this year showed that 36 percent of Americans who believe that abortion should be illegal in “most” or “all” cases favor an exception in the law for abortion in cases of rape. There are good philosophical reasons for opposing abortion even in the difficult cases when pregnancy results from rape – but there is not majority support for such a comprehensive ban.

So, if the pro-life movement pushes for more stringent bans, it may be able to keep its prohibitions in place in the most strongly evangelical states (such as Alabama, for instance), but the fact that it’s starting to lose referendum votes even in places like Kentucky shows that it may begin to get pushback even in the conservative upper South and Midwest.

4) The abortion restrictions that have been passed have had only a very modest effect on the abortion rate. The New York Times estimated that approximately half the women who were denied an abortion in their home state because of restrictions that went into effect this summer traveled across state lines to obtain an abortion elsewhere. The other half either decided to carry their pregnancy to term or ordered abortion pills online through international suppliers. It is difficult to know how many chose the latter option, but even if we assume the number is zero (which is undoubtedly unrealistic) and that all of the women who did not cross state lines for an abortion gave birth instead (or will give birth early next year), the national abortion rate appears to have decreased by only 6 percent.

The reason why the decline in the abortion rate was so modest, even after thirteen states (as of this month) adopted near-total abortion bans and others enacted substantial abortion restrictions, is that nearly all the states that adopted abortion bans had very low numbers of abortions to begin with, since the number of abortion clinics in those states was often in the low single digits even before Dobbs. Despite all of the furor over the new abortion bans, the abortion laws that went into effect this summer actually had very little effect on the numbers of abortions that actually occurred. Approximately 89 percent of the abortion providers operating in the United States in the year immediately before Dobbs were located in states that are not even considering abortion bans and that will continue to offer legal (often publicly subsidized) abortion, just as they always have.

5) The activists in the abortion debate will need to rethink their strategy if they want to achieve their goals. The abortion rights movement spent an unprecedented amount of money this year trying to win elections on abortion rights. The Democratic Party spent more than $200 million on abortion-focused television advertising – far more than it devoted to any other issue in this year’s midterms – and Planned Parenthood spent $50 million (a record for that organization). In the evangelical South, those efforts resulted in very little success.

But the pro-life movement has also largely failed to secure its goals, despite passing restrictive abortion laws in more than a dozen states. The reductions in the abortion rate have been extremely modest. Their actions in conservative states have resulted in a backlash elsewhere, making it very unlikely that they will be able to expand their campaign in other regions of the country.

Instead, it appears that the abortion debate this year has widened the divisions between two very different regions of the country and has made a national solution to the controversy more unattainable than ever.

But this does not have to be the end of the story. There is more than one route to protecting unborn human life. The pro-life movement has focused its political energy on abortion bans, but there has been little attention given this year to proposals that would offer positive alternatives to abortion and that would arguably reduce the abortion rate by giving people in low-income homes the healthcare and structural support they need to raise healthy children – measures that might prompt some women to choose childbirth rather than abortion.

And for the abortion rights movement, there is likewise more than one way to protect women’s rights and promote social justice. Even as Democrats invested tens of millions of dollars in campaigning for abortion rights, they never made bills such as the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act a political priority. Instead, they wasted their efforts blasting away at restrictive abortion laws in the rural South, when expanding Medicaid funding and pregnant workers’ rights in those areas would arguably do more to help low-income women in those states than abortion legalization ever would.

2023 could be another year of continued stalemate and polarization over abortion, with states in the Bible belt becoming ever more extreme in the search for more restrictive laws and states in the North and West Coast expanding the number of abortion clinics. Or, it could be the year that the pro-life movement decides to find meaningful ways to reduce the abortion rate that will have appeal outside of evangelical rural areas. As we begin the first full year of a post-Roe abortion policy environment, the choice is ours.

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