A Year Since Dobbs

Be careful what you wish for.

For those who wanted to see Roe v. Wade overturned little has gone right since they got what they wanted exactly a year ago today in the Dobbs decision.

The public is more pro-choice. According to Gallup polling, 69% of Americans think abortion should be legal in the first trimester, a record high. And while minorities of Americans support abortion later in pregnancies, the percentages that do support it are higher than ever.

Liberals are winning elections they might otherwise have lost. Democrats were staring down disaster last fall, but in the end Republicans barely took back the House and the Senate remained in Democratic hands. In August Wisconsin will have a liberal majority on its state Supreme Court. Overall, the Dobbs decision has turned abortion into a big liability for Republicans.

Abortion may have become no less frequent. Nobody knows for certain, but there is evidence to suggest that, after an initial dip of about 6%, the number of abortions has not been reduced by the Dobbs decision. We don’t know for certain because at-home drug-induced abortions were the leading method even before Dobbs and those abortions are not recorded. Also, even if the numbers were down a bit, that would just continue a long-term trend of less abortions that was ongoing before Dobbs. In any event, with half the states heavily restricting, if not outlawing, abortion even a 6% drop would have to be considered small under the circumstances.

So, in other words, social conservatives are seeing public opinion move even further away from them while they’re losing elections to liberals who oppose the rest of their conservative agenda. And it may all be for naught as abortions continue more or less apace.

For half a century abortion worked to the political advantage of those who opposed it. That’s because the two-thirds of Americans that supported Roe thought that right was secure and so they could concern themselves with other issues. As we know all too well from the gun issue, what’s important isn’t so much where the majority stands but rather who is motivated to vote on that issue. Dobbs has now motivated the majority, a powerful thing.

And Republicans are caught in a death spiral on this. The other day a bunch of their presidential candidates showed up at a pro-life conference to double down on a losing issue for them. Mike Pence led the way by calling for a national abortion ban after 15 weeks, though he’d like something even more restrictive. Remember when Republicans used to say that all they wanted was to return the issue to the states?

As a Democrat you might be thinking I’d be dancing on Republican political graves over this. Not all that much. For one thing, I don’t think it’s great that women need to travel out of state or perhaps induce abortions that might be better handled in a clinic setting. The number of abortions might not have changed much, but the circumstances have and that’s a problem.

And for another, this masks fundamental weaknesses within my party that won’t go away and will come back to haunt us whenever abortion once again reaches some kind of steady state. We’ve become a party of the college-educated and the college-educated are only one out of three Americans — coincidentally the same portion of Americans who oppose abortion even in the first trimester.

But for now social conservatives got what they wanted and, for them, it’s pretty much a disaster.