The New York Times editorial board wants liberals to start winning new legal protections for abortion at the ballot box. The editors are in for a wake-up call.
The New York Times editorial is a predictable liberal piece on abortion, right down to the complaints that Republicans would make it easier to get contraception if they were really pro-life — in fact, they have tried to make it easier and have been met by resistance from liberal groups — and that “extreme partisan gerrymanders” are the reason Republicans can pass more restrictions on abortions at the state level. But the main thrust of the piece is that liberals cannot rely on the Supreme Court to protect abortion anymore. They must now go win support for abortion among the public.
The editors paint a rosy picture of this new strategy. Abortion can be protected, they say, “through a concerted political campaign that harnesses public support with a message of openness and pride.” After all, if “Shout your abortion” isn’t a winning message, then what is?
The editors are far more confident than any conservative that the Supreme Court will gut the absurd court-created abortion regime that we currently suffer. But beyond that, The New York Times understates just how much “defense” pro-abortion activists have been playing. Poll after poll shows that people support limiting abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy — i.e., 12 weeks. The Mississippi law that the Supreme Court is reviewing in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization bans nearly all abortions after 15 weeks, so it is well within the time period that a majority of the country supports.
What’s more, the “heartbeat bills” that pro-abortion activists so fiercely oppose, which ban abortion after a heartbeat is detected (around six to seven weeks of pregnancy), are closer to majority support than the prevailing Democratic standard of no restrictions on abortion at any point. And, despite Democrats constantly trying to whip up panic among their own voters about how abortion is in jeopardy, this tactic has repeatedly failed to resonate as a major issue — well, except among conservatives, that is.
Abortion is simply not a winning issue for Democrats. The recent race in Virginia proved that. Even as Texas’s new and relatively restrictive abortion law was going into effect, inspiring a national panic among the left-leaning commentariat, Virginia voters were unbothered — among those who voted on the issue of abortion, exit polling shows that Glenn Youngkin, the pro-life candidate, won.
The only support generated for the abortion issue, aside from the Democrats’ own activist base, is from those who would preserve the status quo. So long as abortion is out of sight and out of mind, many voters are willing to accept it, but they’re not exactly going to cross the street to save it.
What’s more, it is sure to backfire if they attempt to reframe the issue of abortion, a procedure designed to end the life of an unborn child, with ridiculous euphemisms such as “openness and pride.”
Democrats don’t have a real strategy on abortion because, until now, they have never needed one. They relied on theatrics and the support of the Supreme Court without bothering to gauge where voters stood on this issue. They can’t craft a winning electoral message on abortion because they have allowed their position on it to become more radical than the public is willing to support. Being more open and prideful, as the New York Times’s editors are encouraging, will only amplify that disconnect.
