I am sure American social media is today swamped with hot takes and interpretations of the vote in Kansas on abortion rights. I am not sure I can do more than lay out thoughts that many other people will also articulate. But let me take a stab at it nonetheless.
I’ve long been of the view that the establishment Republicans who controlled the GOP between 1980 and 2012 or so never really wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, nor even to pass laws that would dramatically intrude on the protections provided by that decision. Abortion was useful to the party leadership as a mobilizing issue in two ways. First, because it was a powerful way to articulate a more pervasive and complex series of antipathies towards women’s rights, a dense point of intersecting sentiment and meaning that touched on sexuality, family, reproduction, women’s economic autonomy, male authority over women, and so on, and that speaking to these feelings without having to make explicit their total scope drew men (and not just white men) to the party as well as women who for various reasons (often class-based) disdained changes to the status of women in American society. Second, because the GOP could use the protection of reproductive rights (and later of same-sex marriage) as a way to rail against how “they” (the Democrats, the liberals, the educated) had established an illegitimate political chokehold through the courts to protect their own social and cultural preferences.
The leaders wanted to stay in that space forever, I think, with abortion something they could always complain about but never actually confront. That started to change after 2010 or so as the effect of Republican gerrymandering really took hold and many House districts and some Senate seats went to more and more extreme candidates who actually believed in doing what the GOP establishment had pretended to want to do. It changed even more as the Supreme Court fell into the hands of true believers who really didn’t care what the consequences of their decisions might be for the nation.
I think the Kansas vote is the first sign that the more cynical GOP desire to keep from crossing the line from fulminating against abortion to actually outlawing it was a pretty canny (if unsustainable) bit of political thinking. Even in conservative parts of Kansas, it’s plain that some people who personally oppose or dislike abortion recognize that it’s a bad idea to translate that personal preference into a law—that doing so will create a number of bad outcomes in terms of forceful interventions into women’s health and in terms of destructive enforcement regimes and that it is taking away a right that some of their fellow citizens counted on and valued.
I think in any democracy—or perhaps any political system whatsoever—both citizens and authorities know that taking away is a supremely dangerous thing to do. It’s one reason that some of the hardest fights in politics are about giving something new, precisely because taking away something after it’s been established creates anger and resentment.
This really was just the basic moral proposition of “choice” from the beginning: that this is a decision that individuals should be allowed to make for themselves, and that the responsibility of people who oppose one resolution of that decision is to persuade their fellow citizens to always make one preferred choice. In a broad sense, the campaign against abortion was succeeding in doing so, if you look at changes in opinion and in the frequency of women choosing to terminate a pregnancy over time.
When some group in a democracy isn’t content with that sort of long-term persuasion, and insists on using law—and force—to suppress an existing choice, it is not a sign of strength but of weakness. It’s what groups do when they know they have no hope of commanding a majority and they have no standing with the people they’d need to persuade. But when you force your preference on others through the law, you tend not only to reveal how weak you were but to push people away from you who might otherwise have agreed with your views. Because you’ve shown that you’re a worse danger.
So I suspect Kansas will not be the last place where that actual weakness of the anti-abortion movement gets revealed. Once you cross into really restricting rights as opposed to just complaining a lot, you shift the electoral calculus of quite a few voters. The question really is what happens next: weak interests who have managed to seize some form of dominating power rarely retreat prudentially once their vulnerabilities are revealed.
Image credit: "The Ruby Slippers / Judy Garland" by Tony Fischer Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
And actual human beings will die, have their fertility destroyed, become permanently debilitated. So the dog could sell tickets to his car chasing racket.
Totally agree, Tim. As some have pointed out, the dog has caught the car. Now what? Either you go for the Republic of Gilead, full bore, or you try to finesse it. People who are suffering therefore must be lying because you declared their inevitable suffering to be exaggerated or nonexistent in making the argument in the first place. Did you read that Times article about the pro-life family suddenly confronting the medical emergency of their daughter’s pregnancy? They tried prayer, and when that didn’t change the physical reality of infection, they piled into a car and drove to Georgia where the procedure could still be done (for now). Along the way, the woman’s parents met up with a pro-life protester in the clinic parking lot and affirmed that they were with him, BUT their daughter needed help. And there’s the dog barking at the car it caught.