President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks. Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has been one of Donald Trump’s fiercest allies on Capitol Hill. But since his easy re-election last November, he’s also been someone within the Republican party who demanded public commitments from Trump’s nominees on several issues of importance to him – areas of concern that include the influence of big tech, the encroaching role of China and a promise on the part of nominees with little or no record on the abortion issue to support pro-life policies. Senator Hawley spoke to me on the 100th day of Trump’s second presidency about what he’s seeing on tariffs, foreign policy and China.
The politics of the abortion issue in the post-Dobbs environment has been dramatically altered, both by the introduction of state-level restrictions in Republican states and by pressure campaigns in Democrat-dominated states to increase the subsidization and solidification of existing lax abortion policies. But the most significant development in the abortion space in recent years wasn’t a decision that came from the Supreme Court, but from the Biden administration – first temporarily (with Covid as the justification) and then permanently granting the ability to dispense abortion-inducing pills via telehealth, without the previously required visit to a doctor.
Every election has winners and losers that extend beyond the politicians themselves, but in this particularly unique situation, the sheer number of outside individuals, movements and institutions who can be categorized as winning or losing based on last night’s sweeping result for Donald Trump and Republicans is astounding. Winner: the bro army and its defenders. The decision to lean so hard into appealing to the American manosphere, with its testosterone-fueled UFC events and a litany of podcasts hosted by comedians with mass appeal to young men, ran the risk of turning off female voters or seeming to only prioritize the frat vote. But it proved absolutely correct — and not just the Joe Rogan interview, though that was a key step in the journey.
On the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the Biden campaign is getting aggressive on abortion. While President Joe Biden is mostly locked away at Camp David preparing for Thursday’s first presidential debate against Donald Trump, he released a video blaming Trump for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, “putting women’s lives in danger.” “Decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the White House,” Biden said. “We know what will happen if he gets another four. For MAGA Republicans, Roe is just the beginning. They’re going to try to ban the right to choose nationwide. They’re coming for IVF and birth control next.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs decision two years ago this month, pro-abortion activists have scrambled to prove that ensuing state laws restricting abortion are putting women’s lives in danger. Although the vast majority of abortions are performed for reasons of convenience, the new trope is that women are going to die en masse if they can’t have access to these procedures. There are a couple of angles to this argument: Abortion bans and restrictions will render doctors unable to provide life-saving care to women Because abortion is safer than pregnancy, forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term puts her life in danger In this edition of Culture Shock, we are going to dig into the first claim.
Abortion was the single biggest issue that led to Donald Trump winning the 2016 election. It may be the single biggest issue that leads him to lose in 2024. The death of Antonin Scalia in Texas in February of 2016 set the presidential election in stark relief. Effectively, voters were asked not just to name the next president, but to decide simultaneously the immediate future of the Supreme Court. Elect Hillary Clinton and you get a Court that will enshrine abortion for eternity; elect Trump and the possibility that Roe v. Wade could be reversed in the decade to come stays alive. This is one of the reasons that Trump, a lifelong limousine liberal on issues like abortion, went so hard into the paint on the topic.
It was the elephants that were the problem. Pyrrhus loved them, of course — he had two dozen of the mighty beasts, outfitted with war towers and dressed to impress. But when it came time for an assault on the city-state of Argos, they wouldn’t fit through the small gates, leading to chaos and delays as the towers had to be taken apart and mounted again on the other side. When Pyrrhus finally realized he was facing stronger opposition than expected, he decided retreat was wiser, but a botched message to his son’s forces out- side the city led them to attack. The Pyrrhic elephants ran into each other on the streets. One fell and blocked a key gate, another went wild when its rider was killed. Amid the chaos, Pyrrhus was knocked from his horse and decapitated.
I was twenty-one in 1960 and I can remember exactly what my godfather gave me for my coming-of-age present. It was an abortion. He didn’t know this, of course, but he gave me £200 and that is what I used it for. I have never told this story before and am only doing so now because of the return of abortion to the heart of political debate after last year’s Dobbs decision, which has led to the tightening of abortion laws in many states across America. I know firsthand about the danger and misery of illegal abortions, because I had one myself in the days, pre-1967, when abortion was illegal in Britain.
Ask anyone about politics these days and you’re likely to hear that our government institutions are in crisis. And not just government institutions, really, but American institutions: the nuclear family isn’t what it used to be; the local community group is drying up; the glazed donut bacon double cheeseburger is harder to find than in our glory days. But in particular it’s our government institutions that are in crisis — which is why the Supreme Court is so important. As Congress buckles under the pressure of endless fundraising and cable news navel-gazing, as the presidency stagnates with its shambling commander in chief and massive bureaucracy, at least the Court still seems to work. In fact, it can seem like an oasis of deliberation in a political scene gone mad.
If you want to be a prominent member of Congress in this day and age, the surest path is to become a hype machine for the ideological extremes of your party. Yet Nancy Mace gives no signs of responding to these tabloid incentives in conversation with her constituents. It’s an odd thing to say about a politician in 2023, but you might even find yourself taking her seriously. In a Washington where the House of Representatives is dominated by GOP would-be pundits, including bomb-throwers such as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, the second-term Republican from South Carolina’s 1st district sounds like a politician from a different era.
Margaret (not her real name) is a board certified OB-GYN practicing in a Catholic, pro-life hospital system in Michigan. Ever since the Dobbs decision this summer, abortion politics have made it harder to do her job. In particular, as she explained to me, messaging from pro-choice campaigners and politicians has left patients thinking that laws that restrict abortion also restrict the ability of doctors to provide medical care for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or life-threatening complications of pregnancy. The weekend after the Dobbs decision came down, Margaret witnessed a woman put in danger by medical professionals because of this misinformation and their misunderstanding of the abortion laws in her state.
Democrats head into the midterms praying that abortion-rights supporters will reward them for failing. If the Democratic Party has stood for anything over the past half-century, it has stood for the right to end a pregnancy. All the party had to do was to defend the status quo established by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. But it proved unable to do that, despite the two-term administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, despite controlling the Senate from 2007 to 2015 and again from 2019 until now, and despite the virtual monopoly Democrats enjoy on the sympathy of the news and entertainment media. With all these advantages, Democrats could not safeguard a right that their voters consider fundamental. Now Democrats expect voters to trust them to regain what they lost.
With the 2022 midterms now only a month away, there isn't a candidate anywhere who can avoid fielding questions about abortion. The issue is fair game thanks to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in its recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And all the more so because, at least in theory, Congress could act to either federally legalize abortion or federally ban it. So it is that abortion has become a major topic of conversation in the US Senate campaign in Georgia, where NFL legend Herschel Walker and incumbent Senator Rafael Warnock are locked in one of the most pivotal races this year.
Earlier today, I went outside and threw a frisbee at a tree. Then I came back inside and the chyron on CNN read: "VIRGINIA MAN'S FRISBEE GAMBIT COULD BE GAME-CHANGER IN MIDTERMS." Yes, it is political silly season, which is to say election season, which is to say any one of the four seasons. Pundits have been hyperventilating about the 2022 midterms since approximately 1922, so what a delight that we're finally a mere seventy-seven days out. At least this cycle isn't being trumpeted as THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIVES, a moniker that's been applied to every presidential contest since the delightfully sleepy Clinton/Dole showdown of 1996. Think of it: back then, MTV was actually worried about voter apathy! Don't ever tell us '90s kids we have nothing to be nostalgic for.
Amid a Senate primary season that's seen wins by a number of inexperienced candidates with serious question marks, the attitude of the Republican consultant class in Washington has been straight out of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: DON'T PANIC! Yes, the argument goes, these candidates are not ideal; yes, it's going to take some effort to hold the seats of key retiring Republicans with so many new faces; and yes, the gubernatorial candidates in some key contests aren't doing the GOP any favors. But overall the attitude remained positive, at least through the first six months of the year. Now, all of that has changed.
After all the pro-life enthusiasm following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, it was immediately clear to anyone paying attention that the politics of abortion in America would be completely changed. We now have the first example of that in Kansas, where a well-funded pro-abortion effort was able to block an attempt to amend the state constitution to allow the legislature to regulate abortion. Even in a Republican-heavy electorate, the ballot measure failed by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent as of press time — fueled in part by heavier than expected opposition from more socially moderate mail-in voters. For pro-lifers, their incrementalist strategy over much of the past fifty years focused on the courts.
We don't really negotiate much in the US and so we're bad at it. The American style of negotiating is to demand everything and settle for nothing less. We ask for an outrageously large amount and "bargain down" after the other side offers an equally outrageous small amount. Starting anywhere near your actual number is considered a sign of weakness. We don't like gray areas and we don't like to feel like we've lost out on something. So being asked to support something that on its face seems reasonable, like allowing two people in love living together in a home they co-own to marry, means buying into a whole LGBTQIA2+ agenda that somehow includes forcing kids to listen to drag queens read stories aloud about sexually ambitious caterpillars and their same-sex tadpole pals.
Few releases have been better timed. “By the time this book is in your hands,” write authors Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, “we will all know how the Court has ruled.” And they were right, just barely: I began reading Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing the day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. Perhaps some might counter that now that the abortion movement has suffered such a blow, Tearing Us Apart is actually poorly timed. We won, didn’t we? Why rehash all the arguments against abortion in light of victory? Yet such thinking fails to understand how terribly toxic fifty years of an American abortion regime has really been.
You must have seen the horrific story reported out of Ohio. A 10-year-old child became pregnant through sexual abuse. Under the new post-Roe abortion laws in Ohio, she is ineligible for a termination because she was found to be six weeks and three days pregnant. Her unnamed doctor called a named abortionist in next-door Indiana where terminations can currently be performed past six weeks and began the process of arranging the out-of-state procedure. Someone took the story to the press, where it quickly became a Handmaid's Tale-level news item, the near-perfect example of everything wrong with overturning Roe v. Wade. It was almost too good (or too evil?) to be true. The victim was very young, below the average age of menses.
