Abortion bans affect all pregnancies. That's bad news for the GOP

For nearly 50 years, the only thought most elected Republicans ever had about abortion was showing the anti-abortion lobby just how far they’d go to restrict it. It was easy for them: Sign onto whatever new restrictions were proposed, no matter how egregious, demeaning, or invasive. If you supported it, you got a little gold star and the coveted endorsement of the biggest forced-birth organizations to display on your campaign site. The best part? No one could challenge these bills. They were all written prospectively, to be triggered at some vague time in the future after Roe v. Wade was overturned. 

You’d have expected some of these legislators to take a beat and reflect, at least a tiny bit, on the potential consequences of their votes. But seemingly, none did. And for years, these prospective laws gathered dust on the books in red states. 

Then the stars aligned. During his presidency, Donald Trump sat three conservative Supreme Court justices, and those justices overturned Roe. In the blink of an eye, a long-held constitutional right was blithely erased by Justice Samuel Alito and his cadre of backslapping Federalist Society colleagues on the court. And all those “trigger” laws—laws that few expected would one day be enforced—suddenly became the law of the land. Republicans everywhere rejoiced and congratulated themselves. They’d accomplished something! 

But now, two years later, Republicans are belatedly waking up to the monster they’ve created. Not because of the harm they’ve meted out to millions of their own citizens—that never truly bothered them—but because that monster is now devouring them politically.

Reality is kicking in—just in time for the 2024 election.

As Kate Zernike writes in The New York Times, abortion access isn’t being pushed by only those who want the choice to terminate their pregnancy. It’s also being driven by those who want to be pregnant:

The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?

This is not a conversation the Republican party can afford. Since they are solely responsible for these laws and their consequences, the last thing Republicans wanted was the American public to connect those laws with threats to the safety of all pregnancies, present and future. People may disagree about abortion, but they damn sure don’t want these laws standing in the way of them or their daughter receiving lifesaving medical care. 

But that’s exactly what’s happening. As Molly Jong-Fast observed in Vanity Fair:

Everything post-Roe has moved at lightning speed, with 21 states going backward by either banning the procedure or restricting it severely. America is significantly more dystopian than our mothers dreamed in their worst nightmares, as women’s lives are put at risk due to doctors’ fears of acting even in a medical emergency. In Tennessee, doctors refuse abortions to women carrying babies that will surely die, while a woman having a miscarriage who sought care in Missouri and Kansas was denied an abortion, prompting the Biden administration to issue a “statement of deficiency” to those hospitals. A report by Lift Louisiana, a reproductive rights organization, found that doctors were in some cases waiting until pregnant women had entered their second trimester to offer prenatal care, worried they could be blamed for a first-trimester miscarriage.

No Republican legislator considered whether the laws they’re so proud to have passed would force women to literally shop themselves out to multiple hospitals after nearly bleeding to death before receiving routine treatment for a miscarriage. No Republican legislator worried that the law they bragged about on their website would compel a woman in septic shock to wait until she was on the brink of death before being “allowed” to terminate her pregnancy. No Republican legislator seemed troubled that the laws they championed could cause an abrupt increase in infant and newborn deaths—as has happened in the state of Texas, which allowed no recourse for those carrying a fetus with fatal congenital abnormalities. 

That new data from Texas—which bans nearly all abortions—is particularly appalling because it suggests what may soon follow in other states with similar laws. As reported by Devi Shastri for the Associated Press:

Among causes of deaths, birth defects showed a 23% increase, compared to a decrease of about 3% in the rest of the U.S. The Texas law blocks abortions after the detection of cardiac activity, usually five or six weeks into pregnancy, well before tests are done to detect fetal abnormalities.

NBC News’ Kaitlin Sullivan and Jason Kane also reported on what is occurring in Texas:

“The specific increase in deaths attributable to congenital anomalies really makes an ironclad link between the change in the law and the terrible outcomes that they’re seeing for infants and families,” said Nan Strauss, senior policy analyst of maternal health at the National Partnership for Women & Families, who was not involved with the research. “The women and families have to suffer through an excruciating later part of pregnancy, knowing that their baby is likely to die in the first weeks of life.”

And these horrific outcomes may imperil Republicans’ political prospects more than they realize. People in states where abortion is legal have seen what women have to face in Texas and similar states, and they know who is responsible. And they will no doubt vote to keep that from ever happening in their state, which means voting against any Republicans who might want to get a foothold in their state’s legislature. The revulsion that these draconian laws engender does not stop at the state line. 

As Zernike notes in her Times article, a poll conducted in April showed that nearly half of all registered voters “had heard stories of women forced to cross state lines to get abortions they needed because of pregnancy complications—up 11 points since September.”

Zernike interviewed Tresa Undem, who conducted that poll:

“Now it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant,” she said. “It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”

And that’s a huge problem for Republican Senate hopefuls like Kari Lake in Arizona, Sam Brown in Nevada, and David McCormick in Pennsylvania. These virulent forced-birthers, all campaigning swing states, must now justify positions they had championed until now, no matter how hard they scrub their websites. It’s a problem for the 125 Republican House members who sponsored the “Life at Conception Act” before the Alabama Supreme Court found that frozen embryos were “little people,” thereby effectively outlawing in vitro fertilization. And it’s a problem for Donald Trump, who set all this into motion and who routinely brags about how he overturned Roe v. Wade.

Most of the Republican legislators responsible for these monstrous laws were arrogant, pompous men, although a fair number of equally callous Republican women went right along with them. None of them seems to have even dimly considered the broad consequences that these abortion restrictions would cause—consequences that go far beyond their primary goal of forcing people to give birth against their will. Put simply, Republicans just didn’t think to care.

And now these Republicans—and their entire party—are caught in a trap of their own making.

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