The Supreme Court clarifies the unthinkable is here on abortion

After half a century abortion rights protected by landmark case of 1973 Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court on Wednesday offered the clearest signs that the era of reproductive freedom is coming to an end.

The court spent the morning hearing oral arguments regarding the Mississippi law making the law unable to have an effective abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy. State law was clearly violated Roe and decades of stable legal precedent — and that’s exactly why Republicans wrote it. Mississippi’s Skeptical Legal Effort is the latest in a decades-long effort by Republicans to build a test case that could potentially overturn abortion rights.

Supreme Court’s New Conservative Majority almost handing Republicans one of their most consequential victories in a generation, but you wouldn’t know it if you listened to lawmakers. For a party that constantly makes noise in every possible media outlet, elected GOP officials are oddly reluctant to take credit for their fight against women. They have good reason to raise: 80% of Americans nationwide support abortion rights. By gutting Roe, The GOP is declaring war on a far-reaching and astonishing coalition.

Conservative judges Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas recognize this political conundrum. Instead of moving forward with an outright repeal, Republican judges are hiding their partisan game behind an incremental approach. The 24-week “duration period” for an abortion is outlined in Roe and reinforced in Planning Parenthood in Southeast Pennsylvania sues Casey is intended for legal trash. Instead, Kavanaugh outlined a “states rights” system – stop me if you’ve heard this – under which millions of women in the red states would find themselves without the right to have an abortion.

The Court’s decision will almost certainly be catastrophic. It will also provide battered Democrats with an invaluable opportunity to improve on what has been reported about the brutal 2022 election. For Republicans, who privately acknowledge their stance on abortion as a drag at the polls, a cultural conversation focused on reproductive rights could be the only way for Democrats to maintain majority in the House and Senate.

“There is a complete disregard for women and families that are at the heart of the GOP foundation,” Bridge America President Jess Floyd told. The Daily Beast. “The job of the Democrats is to make sure voters understand that this is not a fluke, this is not a side story. The central argument that Republicans are making is that women don’t matter.”

Before Democrats can start hitting back, they need to admit that they have been fooled by years of Republican messaging that views abortion as a polarizing and unpopular issue. In fact, abortion is one of the few unified problems in a divided country: a survey conducted last month by Hart Research Associates and ALG Research found that when an election focuses on abortion rights, respondents are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans by one eye. Profit 71 points. Even worse for the GOP, a whopping 8 out of 10 voters strongly oppose exactly the same types of anti-abortion laws today before the Supreme Court.

But if Democrats win big when abortion is the message, why hasn’t that happened in the past? Simply put, because most voters don’t really know what states like Texas and Mississippi are actually doing with women.

“Only about 34% of voters said they understood what was happening in Texas or had heard of [state anti-choice laws],” said Floryd. “At a higher level of awareness, voters show more interest in protecting the right to abortion. The more we can rely on, this is a message that resonates with constituencies across the political spectrum. “

That’s bad news especially for the Republican Party’s suburban strongholds, which have rebounded slightly in 2021 after ditching Donald Trump for Joe Biden and the Democrats last year. Like Elaine Godfrey written on Atlantic, Suburban Republican women have long played a central role in the GOP’s electoral strategy. They also support the right to choose, an inconvenient fact that makes Virginia Republicans gag about any talk about restricting abortion in Glenn Youngkin’s successful bid for governor this year.

Democrat strategist Emily Tisch Sussman argued: “If Roe sues Wade to be overturned, millions of women will certainly give up. “Democrats have never been able to mobilize their voters based on threats to the courts, where Republicans have, and part of that is young voters who have never lived in a world where Roe wasn’t the law of the country, so they didn’t see an imminent threat to the right to choose. ”

That is about to change. And that means Democrats need to revoke the GOP’s liberties to prevent heated conversations about their anti-liberal agenda, and amplify real-life crises from happening. when a country suddenly steps back in the past 50 years.

“Democrats need to seize this opportunity to make it clear to voters that the Republican Party is outlawed — a stance,” said Kristin Ford, VP of Communications and Research at NARAL Pro-Choice America. unpopular in every state in this country.” “It is time for Democrats to reveal who Republican politicians are and how draconian their agenda is to most Americans. Voters will not forget the politicians who put their families and their freedom first.

The political landscape surrounding abortion has changed dramatically since 1973. A record high number of voters in favor of abortion in 2019, a fact that played out miserably for Republicans a year later in the 2020 election. Even then, many Republican politicians managed to discuss reproductive freedom in one The campaign is dominated by Donald Trump’s excessive rhetoric. They won’t be shaken by the Supreme Court making this issue on every front page in the country.

If Democrats want to treat the 2022 election as a referendum on Republican attacks on abortion, they’ll need to start laying the groundwork now. For millions of Americans, the idea of ​​losing the right to abortion remains an abstraction—one reserved for theatrical debate and never taken seriously. But that unimaginable moment is here, and we must see it as a direct attack on our fundamental freedoms.

“For a long time, it seemed unlikely that the ACA would be taken away, so the people who benefited most from it were not mobilized,” Floyd said. “Over the past 40 years, there has been a degree of confidence that the Supreme Court will uphold our constitutional right to abortion. Now that is not the case. We need to make that clear to voters.”

A good message is not enough – Democrats also need a clear agenda to restore abortion rights that the GOP has already weakened or taken away. Blue states like New York have beefed up their legal protections by explicitly stating the right to abortion in their state constitutions. It was a start, but such a path remains a pipe dream in Trumpist bastions like Mississippi and Georgia. There will be focused federal action to truly protect reproductive rights. NS The Women’s Health Protection Act, which is currently awaiting a vote in the Senate, only offered a solution.

Make no mistake, we’re tracking the most successful attempt to date to deprive US citizens of basic rights. But that doesn’t have to be. In attacking widely held and widely advocated liberties like abortion, Republicans have given Democrats a golden opportunity to expose how harmful the GOP agenda is to ideas. awareness of our national identity. They won’t get another chance.