A high-stakes legal drama around a pregnant woman in Texas and the Supreme Court’s announcement it will consider restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone are the latest unwelcome reminders for Republicans that abortion rights will be front and center ahead of the 2024 election.
Abortion has been a calamitous political issue for the GOP since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer — and it’s been a boon for Democrats, boosting them to a string of electoral victories on the issue and lowering their losses.
At a time when President Biden’s approval ratings are down and his party is badly divided over Israel’s war in Gaza, abortion rights are seen as a major unifying and motivating issue as 2024 heats up, particularly as Republicans can be cast as seeking to curtail access to the medical service.
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Across-the-aisle tensions on abortion have been on full display over the last week after the Texas Supreme Court blocked Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, from having an abortion. Cox left the state to obtain an abortion just hours before the Texas court rejected her challenge.
Biden has already sought to wield the case as a cautionary tale against Republicans in power and against the GOP presidential front-runner, former President Trump.
“I don’t think they can escape it,” Republican strategist Liz Mair said of next year’s White House candidates, adding that the recent Texas case underscores the salience of the issue.
The president’s party is largely unified behind the right to abortion access — while Republicans are more internally splintered on the specifics of what anti-abortion policy looks like.
“Democrats are going to want to make it a major issue in the general election,” GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak said of abortion, arguing that while Republicans have the edge on issues like immigration, Democrats are “winning” on this front.
“We’re in kind of an uncertain period where there doesn’t appear to be a major consensus within our party about how to proceed,” Mackowiak said. “The reason we’re not on offense is that we don’t have a message on it. And we don’t have a message because different states are dealing with this differently.”
On the GOP’s fourth presidential debate stage in Tuscaloosa, Ala., earlier this month, the four participating candidates — excluding Trump, who skipped the event — debated insurance and gender-affirming care, but abortion didn’t come up in either the candidates’ discourse or the moderators’ questions.
In two presidential town hall events with CNN last week, however, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy faced questions about the latest abortion-related headlines.
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked DeSantis about the Texas case, in which 31-year-old Cox petitioned a state court for a legal exemption to get an abortion, citing that her 20-week-old fetus had been diagnosed with a fatal condition that could also compromise Cox’s future fertility and endanger her health.
DeSantis responded by saying “these are difficult cases” and noted that the six-week abortion ban he signed into law in Florida earlier this year contains exceptions for the life of the mother.
“But that’s a very small percentage that those exceptions cover. There’s a lot of other situations where we have an opportunity to realize really good human potential,” he said.
Ramaswamy was asked during his town hall to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s recent move to consider the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of mifepristone, a common pill used widely to end a pregnancy in the first 10 weeks.
Polling earlier this year found majorities think the drug, which has been used to manage miscarriages and accounted for more than half of abortions nationwide in 2021, should be kept available.
“It’s my opinion … that the FDA exceeded its statutory authority in using an emergency approval to approve something that doesn’t fit Congress’s criteria for what actually counts as an emergency approval,” Ramaswamy said.
DeSantis, seen as a top challenger to Trump, also used his CNN appearance to accuse the former president of being inconsistent in his stances on abortion over the years.
Trump has calledh himself the “most pro-life president ever” and touted his appointments of conservative Supreme Court justices who later ruled against Roe. But he’s also knocked Florida’s ban as a “terrible thing.”
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, the only woman among the top Republican presidential contenders, has branded herself herself “unapologetically pro-life” but has repeatedly cautioned that a federal abortion ban isn’t likely to pass given the current makeup of Congress.
And former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has said he wouldn’t sign a six-week federal ban, recently called out his fellow primary competitors for not giving voters a “straight answer” on their stances on a federal abortion policy and argued the matter should be left to the states.
“For 50 years, Republicans have argued that the Supreme Court took this decision away from the people. I think this belongs in the hands of the people of each individual state,” he said.
Republican strategist Rina Shah said it’s “a mixed bag” of opinions between the Republican electorate, elected GOP officials and the party’s presidential primary candidates.
“Nobody’s on the same page,” Shah said.
GOP strategist Brendan Steinhauser said candidates have to walk a delicate line as the issue repeatedly comes into the spotlight.
“It’s hard to talk about this issue in a way that both satisfies your base and leaves you in a decent position for independent and swing voters,” Steinhauser said.
The recent Texas case and the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the case on mifepristone have added to the political minefield for Republican presidential candidates.
“I think Republican candidates and Republicans in general are trying to avoid it right now already. And I’m not surprised that it didn’t come up in the most recent Republican presidential debate,” Democratic strategist David Thomas said of the issue.
But abortion “couldn’t be any more critical” in 2024, Thomas argued, pointing to the “huge role” the matter played in recent Democratic wins.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe, abortion was seen as fuel for Democratic victories during last year’s midterms. And in this November’s off-year elections, a ballot measure to add abortion protections to the state constitution in red Ohio prevailed more than a year after the state made headlines when a 10-year-old rape victim had to travel out-of-state for the procedure.
Biden used the Ohio win as another chance to knock Republicans and pump wind into Democrats’ sails, touting after election day that voters had “rejected attempts by MAGA Republican elected officials to impose extreme abortion bans that put the health and lives of women in jeopardy.”
A NewsNation Decision Desk HQ poll released earlier this month found that more than half of Americans — 53 percent — think Republicans are doing too much to restrict abortion, including roughly one-third of Republicans.
A recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll also found 55 percent think pregnant women should have access to a legal abortion for any reason, including about a third of Republicans.
Nearly 9 in 10 respondents across both parties said they backed access to abortion in the cases of rape, incest and a woman’s health.
Some Republican strategists are shrugging off how impactful the issue will be along next year’s campaign trail and pointing to pocketbook issues and concerns on the international stage.
“Abortion will not be a priority for Republican voters, because it’s been kicked back to the states,” Shah said. “They don’t even want to really talk about it anymore.”
But others in the party argue that the hot-button issue will at least prove a hurdle for the GOP White House hopefuls.
Steinhauser contended that Republicans should counter Democratic attacks on the issue with offense of their own.
This is gonna play a big role in the primary on the GOP side, and a big role in general,” Steinhauser said.