Republicans divided over abortion ahead of elections

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Last week, the Supreme Court of Arizona upheld a law first passed in 1864, before Arizona was even a state.

Arizona will soon be the latest state with a near-total abortion ban, after that state's Supreme Court revived a 160-year-old law. The law provides no exceptions for rape or incest.

Democrats, including the governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, were quick to denounce the decision.

And the near-total Civil War era ban that continues to hang over our heads only serves to create more chaos for women and doctors in our state.

Surprisingly, though, a lot of Republicans disagreed with the state's Supreme Court, including the party's nominee for president.

The former president criticizing Arizona's revival of the Civil War era ban, adding he won't sign a national ban.

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago, individual states have had the ability to restrict abortion rights, and several have jumped at the chance. So why are Republicans divided on restrictions that they worked so hard to put in place? Why are once-staunch supporters of abortion bans wavering? And, as November fast approaches, will abortion be the issue that swings the election?

The primary story here is always the human suffering that is imposed by these abortion bans.

Moira Donegan is a columnist for Guardian US covering gender and politics.

You know, we went from talking about abortion, you know, just three years ago, as a matter of women's fundamental rights and dignity and of their equal citizenship and equal access to the public sphere. And now we're talking about, you know, women who are really pleading for their survival and who are enduring significant, unnecessary injuries to not just their dignity, but their health and their bodily functioning. And that's always, I think, really at the center of the story. But there is actually, I think, a real rift emerging within the Republican Party. So we have Donald Trump, really, you know, making clear that he understands, I think, correctly that abortion bans are a political liability for him and for Republicans up and down ballot.

So the latest very tricky situation for Republicans comes after a decision in Arizona just last week. Just spell out exactly what the state Supreme Court there have decided and what it's going to mean for women in Arizona.

Right. So in 2022, just as the Dobbs decision was coming down, overturning Roe v. Wade, Arizona passed an abortion ban, what was at the time considered a quite restrictive 15 week abortion ban.

Doctors who perform an abortion past that date could face jail time. The bill still needs to pass the House and be signed by Governor Ducey.

And the state Supreme Court ruled that, you know, this even older abortion ban can go into effect. that would, in fact, sort of overrule the more recent law.

Arizona's Supreme Court today ruled that a 160 year old near total abortion ban is still enforceable.

And that ban was passed into law in a time in the 19th century. It was before Arizona became a state in the union. It was before women in the United States had earned the right to vote. And this is a very unpopular, quite extreme law. It has functionally shuttered abortion clinics in the state of Arizona, which were already operating at limited capacity and under some quite extensive pre-Dobbs restrictions.

I mean, people will be marveling at the idea that this law was even still on the statute books. I mean, from the 19th century, it's just mind boggling to think that was still on the statute book. But there it is being used now. And so in real world terms, what would this change mean for women in Arizona?

Well, it means that abortions that were legal and, you know, at least somewhat accessible in Arizona are now not. Right. And Arizona is quite a large state and driving can be very extensive. Also, you know, some of the other states that Arizonans might flee to if they are in need of abortion, have their own restrictive laws. So, you know, this is something that has made the prospect of terminating pregnancy extraordinarily onerous and expensive and functionally not accessible within the state of Arizona.

So we'll come back to some of the specifics, again about Arizona later on, but just on the broad principle here, as you've explained, Dobbs, that decision from the Supreme Court in 2022 suddenly freed up states to make their own individual decisions. That was something that Republicans had campaigned for for decades. And yet this might be one example that you've just referred to, but it's a wider pattern. Republicans are not delighting in all the changes of the laws that have come as a result, are they?

Well, I think Republicans are sincerely quite split on this issue. There are some who are very, very eager to take a maximalist approach to limiting reproductive rights, curtailing women's rights, and making it much more difficult, much more dangerous to be a woman of reproductive age in the United States. But I think you're right that this has put Republicans in a real difficult position. Because these bans are extraordinarily unpopular, we have seen voters turn out in very large numbers to unequivocally express support for abortion rights every time. abortion itself has been put to a ballot measure, which has happened in a number of states now, including very conservative states.

Voters in Kansas turned out in record numbers yesterday and overwhelmingly rejected a proposed amendment that would have removed the right to an abortion from the state constitution. Voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont approved measures to enshrine abortion rights into their state constitutions, while voters in Kentucky defeated a measure to restrict abortion rights.

So what we're seeing is that even voters who consider themselves Republican, even voters who might consider themselves pro-life, are in fact bulking at these abortion bans now that they are in effect, and now that they are curtailing their lives and hurting their neighbors.

And the electoral peril for Republicans, that is really bearing down on those who care about winning elections. And I'm thinking of one man in particular, namely Donald Trump. He suddenly finds himself asked everywhere what he actually thinks on abortion, what he wants to see happen. I mean, we should give the context that in 2016,, he was out there saying there had to be some form of punishment for women who got abortions. Now he's going around and there's ads made of him bragging that it's thanks to him that Roe v.

Yeah, you know, Donald Trump has had about as many positions on abortion as he has had magazine covers, right? He is somebody who has been very prolifically changing his opinion on this issue based on what he perceives political convenience to dictate. And right now he is in a really conflicted state. On the one hand, the anti-abortion movement remains an incredibly powerful and very moneyed force within Republican politics. These are people he cannot afford to alienate.

Now it's up to the states to do the right thing. Like Ronald Reagan, I am strongly in favor of exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. You must follow your heart of this issue. But remember, you must also win elections.

I don't think it got him out of trouble, right? Because right now abortion is left to the states, and these Republican controlled states are doing some quite maximalist, draconian things to women and to those who can get pregnant.

And I was going to say it doesn't, it doesn't work politically for him, because he has to then ask the next question, which is, OK, and what should those states do? And I'm thinking of one in particular, which is he is resident now in Florida. He will be a voter in Florida in November, where Florida voters are asked to make a judgment about what the rules on abortion should be. That leaves him in a in a corner. Right.

So Florida is one of the states where both the state Supreme Court, like in Arizona, has issued a decision allowing a very restrictive abortion ban to go into effect.

The conservative court finding the state's constitution does not protect abortion rights, which will now allow Florida to ban the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy, before many women know that they're pregnant.

So Florida, which had been a site of sort of abortion seeking migration within the American Southeast, right, people from these even more restrictive states like Louisiana, like Mississippi, like Alabama, were traveling to Florida. That avenue has been cut off. Right. So the Florida State Supreme Court decision effectively cut off abortion access, not just for Floridians, but for Americans across the South. However, that court, in what was kind of termed a split decision, also narrowly allowed a ballot measure to go forward, which would, like many of these ballot measures that are being pushed in anti-choice states, enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and therefore restore abortion access.

So you can see why he, as somebody who's seeking election this year, but other fellow Republicans are getting anxious about this. So this brings us back to Arizona, the state of Arizona, and the woman there who hopes to be the next senator from Arizona, Carrie Lake. Talk to us about her and why she is getting particularly worried about her own electoral prospects in that state.

You know, Carrie Lake is an interesting figure. She's part of this post-Trump subsequent generation of far-right Republican politicians. She is an election denier.

The Republican gained support for criticizing the election system during her run for governor and during the trials, challenging the results of that 2022 race that she never conceded. Tonight, she took a softer approach on it and a bipartisan tone. I am never going to walk away from the fight to restore honest elections.

She is also somebody who, in that gubernatorial race, endorsed the 1864 law.

We will be a state where we will not be taking the lives of our unborn anymore.

She has, over the subsequent past week or so, really had to clarify her position and has struggled to clarify her position.

In a statement following the ruling, Lake says, quote, I oppose today's ruling and I'm calling on Katie Hobbs and the state legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support. Arizona's Democratic governor pointed out the irony of the situation.

This points to a very difficult position that Republican politicians are in on this issue, because they, you know, often they are firstly anti-choice, often they are very indebted to some very powerful anti-choice lobbying groups, but they also have to win an election.

And the result of this, this hanging around the neck of Carrie Lake, is that the famous crystal ball of Larry Sabato, the political forecaster and academic at the University of Virginia, he had had Arizona as a toss-up state between Carrie Lake and a Democratic challenger. He now has that down. The crystal ball now has it down as leaning Democratic. This goes to the point you were telling us before, that whenever abortion is on the ballot, post-Obs, Democrats tend to do very well. It does make you wonder why Republicans in Arizona, with an eye on these kind of polling numbers, didn't in a way listen to the admittedly mealy mouths warnings from Donald Trump or Carrie Lake and others, and just somehow try and get this 1864 ruling overturned, because it would have helped them.

Yeah, so we have a situation here in the U.

Now, we've talked about the impact of a decision the Supreme Court took back in 2022 that is playing out across the 50 states of America and could have this shaping influence on the election. But the Supreme Court is not out of this. It's ongoing. The Supreme Court is going to be again in this area this summer when it faces, or has to make another decision in the realm of reproductive health. You wrote last month about how this bench is going to face another big case.

Yeah. You know, when the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs ruling, Sam Alito's majority opinion said that this ability for states to ban abortion would put the abortion issue to rest and would remove the courts from having to litigate abortion rights. And that has proved the absolute opposite of the case.

It's been on the market for really over two decades. A group of anti-abortion activists is claiming that the FDA failed to adequately evaluate the pill's safety risks and that its approval should in fact be rolled back.

And then next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case regarding a federal law that's known by the acronym EMTALA, and that is a law that requires emergency rooms in all hospitals receiving Medicare or Medicaid money, which is most of them, to provide stabilizing care to patients who arrive in a life-threatening health crisis in their emergency rooms. The state of Idaho wants its own abortion ban to be able to supersede that law. That is, the state of Idaho wants to be able to instruct emergency room doctors not to perform life-saving abortions in defiance of federal law. And the Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments in that case next week.

I think plenty of listeners will have their jaw dropping at that, but they will certainly at the thing I want to ask you about next, before we leave this topic. And that is Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, top supporter, big supporter of Donald Trump, is not content with these new restrictions on abortion rights, but is going after birth control, which was legalized a long time ago, in 1965, in a court ruling which she now says is constitutionally unsound. Is it really a prospect that Republicans, not content with having made abortion illegal in many, many states of the United States, are going to come after contraception?

Yes. So what you see in a lot of the arguments before lower courts and before the Supreme Court is an attempt to say that contraception can be banned because it can be interpreted as abortion. So you have these anti-choice litigants saying that they believe that certain kinds of contraception, especially effective, long-acting, and woman-controlled forms of contraception, such as Plan B, the morning after pill, IUDs, intrauterine devices, and sometimes birth control pills, they're saying that they believe that these cause abortions. That's sort of one litigation track. But there's also, you know, some appetite on the anti-choice right for outright banning contraception.

So that brings me to, in some ways, what I suppose, you know, for people who just focused on who wins in November, the core, heart of the matter, which is how salient, how decisive an issue do you think abortion is going to be in 2024?

Yes. The short answer is yes. I think that this will be, if not the biggest issue in the 2024 election cycle, that at least one whose power really can't be under, overstated. rather. And listen, this is not an abstract concept for American voters.

Earlier this year, Heather Mayberry had to travel out of state to get an abortion after her doctor told her her baby had no chance of living. But Kentucky laws prevented her from inducing labor or getting an abortion. here. Three Tennessee women are suing the state over the abortion law, saying the near total ban put their lives at risk. In Texas, the Supreme Court.

And they are making women go through the experiences of giving birth to infants that cannot survive. They are ruining people's health and their fertility, and they're ruining lives. And those are stories that voters are exposed to over and over and over again. And they understand the weight of them.

So, one way or another, this is going to reverberate on deep into the lives, particularly of American women, but really into the politics of the country. Moira, you do know that before we leave our guests, we do like to ask them a what else question? And we have been reporting on the podcast for quite some time that the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, was holding back on allowing the House of Representatives to vote on aid, military aid, in particular for Ukraine, even though that had passed through the Senate, aid also for Israel. Finally, it seems Mike Johnson has relented and there will be a vote, a menu of options that will be put before members of the House at the weekend.

They offer $61 billion for Ukraine, billions more for Israel. But they'll have separate votes, which could help in battle. House Speaker Mike Johnson win enough votes from both parties. It also could fuel criticism from Republicans, including those trying to oust him, that don't want more money for Ukraine.

Has he essentially made a choice given? there was some on the right of his party? I'm thinking of Marjorie Taylor Greene and others who are so implacably opposed to aid to Ukraine, they thought they would get rid of Mike Johnson if he allowed this to come to a vote. Has he essentially sacrificed his own career, his own speakership, in order to get arms to Ukraine?

You know, there is maybe no job I would envy less than that of being the Republican House leader. Mike Johnson has a caucus of people who are, you know, very opposed to aid to Ukraine, but also who are very incentivized to draw attention to themselves, much more so than to actually govern. Right. That's what you really saw in the ouster of Mike Johnson's predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who was attacked by members of his caucus for a vote in which he had to cooperate with Democrats and get Democratic votes for a policy priority. I think that Speaker Johnson is going to find that he cannot pass aid to Ukraine without, without Democratic votes either.

Moira Donegan, we will watch that one, too. Thank you so much for talking to us for Politics Weekly America.

Thank you, Jonathan.

And that's all for this week. Now, Donald Trump took his seat in a New York courtroom on Monday as he goes on trial for allegedly falsifying business records related to hush money payments used to keep a 2006 affair with the adult film star Stormy Daniels out of the news during the 2016 election. This week was all about finding a jury that would be free of bias, whether that's bias for or against the former president. All of that apparently took a toll on the 77 year old, as it was reported that he nodded off several times during the first day. For all the ins and outs of that case, make sure to follow the Guardian's live blog of the trial.

This is The Guardian.