Arizona GOP’s latest abortion strategy: Restrict, restrict, restrict

After a conservative majority of the Arizona Supreme Court ruled April 9 to uphold an antiquated near-total abortion ban from 1864, the shockwaves on both sides of the political aisle were immediate and obvious. Democrats decried the court’s decision, vowing to redouble efforts to pass an amendment to the state’s constitution. If passed, the Arizona Abortion Access Act would effectively negate the court’s ruling and guarantee abortion access to all Arizona citizens.

Republicans faced a far different political quandary. Sensing dire peril to their electoral prospects in November, they suddenly found themselves furiously backtracking on their previous hardline positions. Many of them clumsily searched for the right words to straddle the chasm between criticizing the court’s draconian ruling while maintaining their fierce opposition to allowing patients to make their own reproductive decisions. 

The overwhelmingly negative response to the court’s ruling could have provided a teachable moment for Republicans, an opportunity to seriously reassess the forced-birth credo that they’ve clung to for decades,  They’ve instead chosen a different course, one that underscores just how utterly contemptuous they are of their own state’s citizens. Rather than acknowledge the unpopularity of their anti-choice position, they’ve decided to try to dupe Arizona’s voters instead.

According to a leaked PowerPoint presentation prepared by Arizona House GOP general counsel Linley Wilson, Republicans’ best course is to deceive Arizonans by forcing them to wade through one, two, or even three competing anti-choice initiatives in order to “dilute” support to amend the state constitution in favor of abortion rights.

The document, “Legislative Strategies for Regulating Abortion (Amidst A Radical Ballot Initiative And Court Chaos),” was accidentally sent last week to Arizona Democrats, as well as the Republicans for whom it was intended. It’s remarkable not simply for the disdain it shows to Arizona voters, but for what it reveals about Republican indifference towards anyone who might ever become pregnant within the state’s boundaries.

Before reviewing the leaked PowerPoint itself, it’s important to remember its intended audience. The document was clearly prepared to provide Arizona GOP legislators a plausible, working strategy on how the party might best respond to the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision and the resulting, newly energized effort to enshrine abortion rights in that state. Significantly, the GOP presentation advances a forced birth agenda only. There is no acknowledgment that just 1 in 10 Arizona citizens—as evidenced by 2022 state polling—favor that agenda. Instead, its focus is entirely on how Republicans should go about thwarting the people’s will.  

That alone reveals a stark disconnect between the Republican Party and the electorate. It illustrates that for Republicans, there is no option but one that restricts, restricts, and restricts again. There is no universe where someone who values their own autonomy to make reproductive decisions can expect Republicans to support them. Party strategy simply does not allow for the possibility that anyone should be permitted to make such decisions themselves. That this PowerPoint was prepared for legislators shows that their agreement with those ideas is implicit. 

The GOP presentation proposes a strategy of intentional deception. It’s not a strategy designed to respond to what the public wants; it’s designed to keep them from it. The plot is designed to keep the power of making reproductive decisions safely in the hands of the state’s Republican-controlled state legislature.

It is worth emphasizing that this “most important” objective to preserve such legislative control can only be pursued because the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision took away the constitutional right to abortion that had been settled law for over 49 years.  

The GOP plan to deceive Arizona voters relies on two separate phases. As seen in the following slide, the plan is to introduce (as Phase I) an accompanying ballot measure (emphasized as “complimentary,” not “conflicting”) to distract voters from the current AAA initiative and permanently enshrine most of the state’s existing abortion restrictions in the state’s constitution. 

For this phase of the subterfuge, an elaborate name for the ballot measure is deemed unnecessary; in fact, “any short title” will suffice.

The restrictions posed here are the ones that the forced-birth lobby enacted in Arizona and other states before the Dobbs decision gave them the right to prohibit abortion altogether. The restrictions include requiring only licensed physicians perform abortion procedures, requiring parental consent for minors seeking an abortion, and prohibiting so-called “partial birth” abortions. As Laurie Roberts, writing for the Arizona Republic explains, this measure would do nothing to protect reproductive rights. It would simply “codify” the restrictions already in place into the state constitution. 

The redundancy is not the point, though. It also is designed to make such restrictions even harder for a new state legislature to alter.

But the real trickery comes in Phase 2:

“Phase 2” requires introducing two competing “initiatives” on the same ballot, with the explicit goal of diluting the vote for the AAA. One initiative proposes a 15-week abortion ban, the other a six-week “Heartbeat Protection” ban; the “Pros” and “Cons” of each are listed. Note: The slide encouragingly notes that the so-called 15-week ban is actually a 14-week ban, since it “would only allow abortion until the beginning of the 15th week.” 

The 15-week ban (with no exceptions for rape or incest) is touted because it appears to be the best path to prevent passage of the AAA. But the slide also warns that passing such a provision would also have the undesirable effect of “transfer[ring] regulation of abortion from the Legislature to voters,” something that Republicans clearly don’t want. 

The a six-week ban is far harsher. It eliminates abortions in cases of rape or incest after 14 weeks, and prohibits almost all other abortions after six weeks—a restriction that effectively prevents someone from terminating their pregnancy by the time they realize they’re pregnant.  

As an “alternative” for Republicans, in the event the AAA passes, the slide also proposes reserving the right of the legislature to pass “reasonable” laws restricting it, “consistent” with the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court—effectively giving the legislature the right to ignore the AAA as it sees fit and pass further measures to weaken it.

The presentation emphasizes that the whole point of these “phased” measures is to confuse voters with a bewildering array of proposals, anticipating that people expecting a quick voting experience won’t have the time, knowledge, or sophistication to distinguish between them.

As set forth in the slide below, the “plan” is to position these Republican proposals on the ballot first, so that voters who haven’t familiarized themselves enough with the differences might select them without fully realizing what they’re selecting.

Last, but not least, this devious GOP plan to confuse and deceive Arizona voters concludes with a flippant attempt at humor. 

The fact that an attorney for Arizona’s GOP legislature felt comfortable adding a cheesy meme to a presentation devoted to policing reproductive rights highlights a sordid aspect to all of this that gets lost in the “debate”: For Republicans (especially since the Dobbs decision), curtailing reproductive freedoms can be reduced to a sadistic game, an exercise in determining just how many restrictions they can impose, and how harsh those restrictions can be. The fact that people’s health, lives and futures are now literally put at grave risk by these prohibitions on their personal autonomy does not matter. Nor does it seem to matter to Republicans that all of these laws come laden with a heavy dose of misogyny that deliberately belittles women’s capacity to make their own health decisions without government interference.

As Jessica Valenti, writing for her ”Abortion Every Day” Substack, observes, the Arizona court’s validation of an 1864 law that was created before women were considered full citizens has made that element of sheer misogyny impossible to ignore. 

“Gone is the pretense that Republicans want to pass abortion bans to protect women’s health, or that they’re enacting laws in service of some grand morality,” she wrote. 

Valenti is blunt on how Democrats should frame this pervasive misogyny as Republicans everywhere attempt to shape-shift their prior positions on abortion.

… The danger abortion bans pose to women’s health and lives makes us afraid, but what makes us furious is the affront to our humanity.

It’s that anger that politicians campaigning on abortion rights need to tap into. The foremost feeling driving American women on abortion rights isn’t fear—it’s humiliation. It is demeaning, incredibly so, to watch as statehouses full of men decide that women were better off in a time when we had no choices, about anything.

If Democrats want to motivate women, they should talk less about how dangerous abortion bans are, and more about what that danger means: that to Republicans, our lives don’t matter. Instead of talking about how women are losing their rights, remind voters why that is: because Republicans don’t want women to have any.

The Arizona GOP has reacted to the backlash against the resurrection of this grotesque “zombie” law by doubling down on the same strategy that has always served them. 

It begins and ends with the premise that anyone who becomes pregnant is simply unfit to decide these issues for themselves. That assumption is more than just offensive and insulting: It’s fundamentally dehumanizing.  

Democrats should take special care to underscore that aspect as the 2024 election approaches. Campaign Action