How abortion could affect the election

I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is a special series from "Apple News Today," all about the 2022 midterm elections.

Earlier this year, it seemed almost inevitable that Republicans were poised to win and to win big in November, buoyed by the president's low approval ratings and high inflation.

But then, in June, things got more complicated.

In a six-to-three decision written by Justice Samuel Alito…

The Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade.

This opinion is very similar to that draft opinion that we saw leak just about a month and a half ago at the beginning of May.

The court has ruled that states can decide whether abortion should be legal or illegal.

The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade upended the expectations for the midterms. Over the summer, there were a number of special elections where Democrats outperformed President Biden's 2020 margins, and voters in Kansas, a typically conservative state, overwhelmingly voted down a constitutional amendment that would have taken the right to an abortion out of the state's constitution.

Well, I think it's hard to overstate what a dramatic reversal the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision that came down in June from the U.S. Supreme Court, what a dramatic reversal that was of what had been the longstanding situation and expectation. So nearly 50 years of the expectation that abortion was a right in this country, a whole generation, generations really, of women grew up with that reality, and, very, very quickly, the reality on the ground has shifted. While abortion wasn't always accessible for women of color and low-income people, it was legal in every state. And now it's not. About a dozen states have banned most or all abortions, and more may be poised to do so soon, particularly depending on the outcome of some of these midterm elections.

We've already seen how some votes or some measures of voter support have indicated that this is a central issue, right? So in a referendum in Kansas, voters there overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion access. There was a New York Congressional race that was also seen as a referendum on the issue, and we have a lot of polls that keep telling us that this is a top issue for voters. So what have you been hearing so far from voters in your reporting about this?

Well, you're right. And we should go back and note that even before the Dobbs decision, most Americans, the majority opposed overturning Roe v. Wade. Obviously, the Supreme Court doesn't make decisions based on public opinion necessarily, but that was the sort of underlying reality. And now polls suggest, as you indicate, that support for abortion rights has strengthened since the Dobbs decision. You could look at a "Wall Street Journal" poll recently for that. There's also evidence from Pew, for example, that approval for the Supreme Court has slipped post-Dobbs. So I think this is a moment where people are having to sort of think hard about what they really think about the reality of abortion policy. It's not just a sort of hypothetical, abstract question anymore, the Supreme Court has now made it possible for states to ban abortion, and many are doing so, and we're seeing the impact of that.

Yeah. And when it moves out of that abstract question, what tends to happen? Because I do think that we've sort of lived in a reality where everybody's consideration of this conversation has been in that realm of hypothetical. And I think it's hard to say what happens when it's no longer abstract.

Right. And again, I want to stress that even before this summer, for many people, getting access to abortion was very difficult. If you lived in a rural area, if you're somebody without transportation, for example, or lived hours-- there were huge swaths of the country where there were, maybe, several states with just one clinic that provided abortions. But it was legal, and there was somewhere you could go. And what's changed now is that to an even more significant extent, a dramatic extent, really, people are having to travel if they want to get an abortion in these states, many of which are in the Midwest and South and some in the West, where abortion is illegal. Just recently, Planned Parenthood reported that in Illinois, which is sort of what they describe as an abortion haven, a state surrounded by other states with very restrictive abortion laws or no abortion access at all, the number of people traveling to their clinic on the Illinois side of the Missouri border just across from the St. Louis area where abortion is not available, the traffic there has increased more than threefold post-Dobbs. And I think one of the gravest concerns for many patients and providers is that it is complicating the ability of doctors to make medical decisions. I've done some reporting, and so have my colleagues, in places like Texas where doctors say they've had to make very difficult, potentially life-and-death decisions about what to do when a pregnancy is ending, a miscarriage situation. We've heard a lot about ectopic pregnancies, of course. As you know, these are, of course, tubal pregnancies that will never be viable and can pose serious risk to a woman's health or life if they're not treated properly. A woman I interviewed went into the emergency room at 19 weeks pregnant with her water breaking. She was miscarrying. Nineteen weeks, as I think most people know who know anything about fetal development, is sadly far too early for the fetus to survive. In that situation, I interviewed her, I interviewed her doctor, her doctor said the standard of care would be to offer her a termination, but doctors did not feel comfortable doing that because of this Texas law. Now that when was, again, at a time when under the Texas law that was passed last year, the penalty was potentially fines and serious financial consequences. Now in some states, the consequences could include jail time. So the stakes are very high for doctors making these decisions.

So, Sarah, I do want to talk about what could potentially happen in November in a minute, but first, can we talk a little bit about the history of how all of this has really progressed in the U.S. and specifically how have the political parties, Democratic Party and Republican Party, mobilized around the issue of abortion historically?

You know, long story short, while much of the opposition to abortion rights these days does come from conservative Christians, whether Catholics or evangelical Protestants, that hasn't always been the case, particularly with evangelicals. There was a time in the seventies when, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention, while not supportive of abortion in all situations, had a more, I think, what you would call more moderate position on the issue, allowing for a broader range of exceptions where abortion could be an acceptable choice. What happened was really kind of in the late seventies, early eighties, and particularly with the rise of Ronald Reagan in the early eighties, this issue became increasingly sort of a rallying cry for the religious right. Think of the moral majority , you know, Jerry Falwell, folks like that were able to mobilize voters around this issue and began a very organized and long-term campaign to get essentially to where they got this summer, overturning Roe v. Wade. And that campaign has involved grassroots work, it's involved voter mobilization at every level, lots of work in churches and with religious leaders, bringing them along as allies, and not just on the abortion issue but also on issues like religious liberty, opposition to same-sex marriage. But abortion was always kind of the-- I think, the number one focal point of that movement, and so these organizations worked for many, many years at all levels of government to elect conservative state lawmakers, to elect U.S. senators who would vote to confirm conservative Supreme Court justices. Then I covered the Trump campaign in 2016 for NPR, and this was something I heard about all the time from particularly voters who said, you know, "I don't really feel great about Donald Trump," his tone, his history, whatever, "but the Supreme Court…" is what I'd hear a lot, and often "Supreme Court" seemed to me to be a stand-in primarily for abortion. Trump delivered for the religious right, right? He was able to choose three justices, and that is why we are where we are today, with Roe v. Wade no longer the law of the land.

Yeah. And it sounds like then, for quite some time, Republicans were really able to use abortion to galvanize their base, you're saying even when people may have been a little uneasy about the candidate himself in this case. So how has the decision in Dobbs changed that going into these midterms?

I would point to Kansas, and I think there are signs that for some voters, again, this sort of seeing the reality of what these laws means might be pushing them a little bit.

McCammon is referring to a proposed state constitutional amendment that was up for a vote in Kansas in August. It was the first state to vote on abortion rights since the Dobbs decision. The amendment would have said there was no right to an abortion in Kansas, and it got voted down in an overwhelming fashion. Nearly 60% of voters rejected it in a state that is relatively conservative, which was seen as a pretty stunning rebuke of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. McCammon says that, at least anecdotally, the abortion ruling does seem to be changing people's minds.

Just for one example, I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, which, for people who don't know [LAUGHS] Kansas City, it's right on the state line on the Missouri side and there are suburbs that go into Kansas. So I grew up going to church in Kansas, and I still have got friends back home, and one of my friends texted me soon after the vote in Kansas just sort of pouring out her thought process about how she wrestled with that issue. She said "Look at little Kansas pulling through last night on the vote. I felt like I was being super rebellious with my vote. And ironically, in the line I stood in, I was surrounded by men on either side. I just wanted to scream 'You don't know what it's like to give up your body for years. You have no idea.' I cried in my car. It's just so complicated. The kicker was the ten-year-old case." She's talking about the ten-year-old girl from Ohio who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion. She was a rape victim at age ten, and Ohio's abortion ban went into effect right at the time that she needed an abortion, so she had to travel across state lines and her story became the center of kind of a national controversy. So my friend says "The kicker was the 10-year-old case. They didn't take care of her, and they certainly won't take care of me if I need another D&C for miscarriage, which is already heartbreaking." And this is a friend of mine who says she's a Republican. She described in this really heartfelt text message going to the pool with other moms, other suburban Kansas moms, and having these really wrenching conversations because I think, for a lot of them, people who may have seen this issue one way, to see the, again, the reality of it being manifest, it puts it into focus in a different way.

Democrats are really starting to campaign quite heavily on this. According to reporting from "The A.P." at the end of September, Democrats had invested 20 times the amount in TV ads referencing abortion than they had in the 2018 midterms. That figure was also bigger than the Republican Party's combined national investments in ads relating to the economy, crime, immigration. So those seem like really interesting dynamics, given that just a few years ago, Republicans would be the ones who would be more overtly campaigning on abortion, and Democrats did not necessarily have that opening to really make it the focus of their campaigns.

Yeah. I think what you're seeing is… Democrats, they're up against a couple of realities. One, obviously, this is a midterm, and so, historically, midterms are not great for the party in power. So that's a challenge. Two, the economy's been difficult, right? The last several months, I mean, inflation's been all over the place. Gas prices are down a bit, but they were very high for a while there, and there's just a lot of uncertainty. And so that's something that Democrats have to offset. The abortion issue, I mean, again, this is a historic moment where suddenly what had been a right for almost 50 years is no longer a right unless a state decides that it is. And so, yes, Democrats are spending tens, hundreds of millions of dollars messaging around this issue, especially in key states. We're seeing groups like NARAL and other abortion rights groups as well spending heavily. I think it is an issue where Democrats see an opportunity to persuade voters, and they have good reason to think that. Again, looking at what happened in Kansas, a red state where voters were clearly, you know, not ready to go along with some anti-abortion activists who wanted to further restrict abortion in that state.

To the point of Democrats kind of being on the offensive here on this issue in a lot of respects, do you think that Republicans anticipated this current political reality that they would be facing? You mentioned the fact that throughout the year there was this sort of preconceived notion that the economy would be kind of the major talking point. Historical trends would suggest that Republicans would have kind of an upper hand this year. Do you think that they predicted this moment that we're in?

Well, I think the big question is-- The metaphor that everyone's used to talk about this is "Has the dog caught the car?" And this has been such a galvanizing issue for voters for so long that I think we won't really know for a number of years. It's not going to just be about one election. A lot of these fights are going to continue in state legislatures, and there will be more efforts next year as many states reconvene for their state legislative sessions to tweak existing abortion laws. I've already talked to advocates who want to see state lawmakers try to find ways to, if not restrict people from crossing state lines, which is very difficult to do, sort of get at some of the interstate issues that this raises. For example, the mailing of abortion drugs into states where abortion is illegal, that's something I spoke to an advocate in Texas about recently. He said that's something he really wants his state lawmakers to work on trying to clamp down on. And then you'll see states like California just passed a legislative package designed to expand access to abortion, and doing that, for example, through expanding the number and the types of providers who can provide abortions, that kind of thing. So we're going to continue to see a tug of war over this issue. And I think that, first of all, the states where abortion is heavily restricted are already pretty red states. So we're going to see, I think, an intensification of the polarization that we see in so many areas and along so many issues in this country already. But how it shakes out long term as more and more states implement these bans and more voters see the impact of them, I don't know. I don't want to really predict because I think there is a scenario in which this could become a new normal, and people could get used to it. And also, keep in mind that wealthier people will always be able to travel and will always be able to find a way. These bans are going to hit low-income people and people of color the hardest and the people who are already, in many cases, on the margins. And so, for me, it does raise the question of, like, will there be sustained interest and concern around this issue? And if so, in what direction and who does it benefit?

And let's pivot for a second to what's actually on the ballot in November. There are a number of states where abortion access is on the ballot itself. Can you give us a quick overview of some of those measures?

Yeah, there are, I believe, five ballot initiatives on the ballot this fall. Kentucky has an initiative coming up this November that's very similar to the one that voters in Kansas rejected, which is to say, it would essentially state explicitly that there is no right to abortion in the constitution. Now, Kentucky already has essentially no abortion. Abortion restrictions are already in place there, and abortions have shut down at the abortion providers. However, there are ongoing legal challenges to those state laws on state constitutional grounds, and the courts are not supposed to make a final decision until after this vote. So whatever voters say in November very likely will have some bearing on the outcome of those cases. Michigan has, I think, probably the other most noteworthy ballot initiative. It's in the other direction. This was a citizen-led effort to try to protect abortion access in the state constitution. And this was sort of through the petition process that you think of: signatures had to be gathered then there were challenges to those signatures. Some anti-abortion groups tried to stop that initiative from getting on the ballot at all, but advocates for the petition prevailed, so that will go before voters. Michigan is a really interesting state because it's kind of a swing state with a Democratic governor right now who's been sort of holding the line against abortion restrictions. There's an old abortion ban on the books in Michigan from the 1930s that Governor Gretchen Whitmer fought in court, and if the governor's mansion were to flip, that would have huge implications for abortion access. That's also the case in several other states like Kansas, for example, and Wisconsin, states with democratic governors where Republican legislatures would have free reign if the governorship flips.

And when you look at the whole map and you look at both the ballot measures and some of the gubernatorial elections, some of the other elections, how will what happens in November impact the future of access? Where does this actually go after the midterms?

Well, again, I think state legislatures are going to continue to be a battleground for this because what the Supreme Court did with Dobbs was say state legislatures now have the power to decide whether or not abortion should be legal or illegal. So, of course, governorships, again, become really significant. Governors have the veto power, they can say no if a legislature tries to pass a law prohibiting abortion, for example. They also can advocate, as they have in some states, for abortion protections and expansion of abortion services. So, state legislatures will be really key, and I would also just point to the fact that there is a push for national legislation, in part because I think advocates on both sides of this issue find it very frustrating that we have a patchwork system, and both would like to see their policy of choice prevail. So we've seen, for example, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, within the last several weeks, proposed a nationwide 15-week ban, which would sort of mirror the Mississippi law that the Supreme Court upheld in the Dobbs case. That would ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks. Now, there aren't the votes in Congress for that now for either side, but I think this is something in terms of the long-term game, the long-term effort here, that both sides have their eye on. And when I've talked to people about this question, "Would there ever be a nationwide abortion ban?" Folks have pointed out to me, well, I think there was a time when people thought that Roe would never be overturned. So it just underscores that every race is important. Every election is important.

Yeah. And I want to sort of close by returning to a point that we were talking about before, which is that banning abortions has been a major cause for the religious right in the U.S. for years and years. And so I'm curious, as a person who has been covering this for so long, was there ever an expectation from groups within that loose framework that this would actually happen? And what does it sort of mean for all of them going forward?

I think they did. I mean, I can't read anyone's minds, but Mike Pence, when he was running for vice president in 2016, vowed to put Roe v. Wade on what he called "the ash heap of history." And I think he meant it, I think that they've all meant it. Whether or not it seemed like a realistic, achievable goal is one question, but this has been a very strategic movement. It's not a movement that looks like it's just playing [LAUGHS], and I think that's why they've been so successful, because at least some of them believed it was possible and that they would eventually succeed. Now, I think the speed with which this has happened in the last several years surprised a lot of people. I remember doing interviews in 2018 with folks who were saying, you know, "If the Supreme Court moves to the right, it's not going to be immediate. We're not going to overturn Roe v. Wade right away." There will be sort of incrementalism, incremental changes. But they got, under Trump, three nominees confirmed, and so I think the anti-abortion movement was able to, within the last few years, move very, very fast to achieve a lot of their goals.

Sarah McCammon is a national correspondent for NPR covering abortion politics and policy. We'll have another episode of our special "Apple News Today" 2022 Midterm series next week. Talk to you then.