A New Generation Offers New Hope for Abortion Rights

Elections send messages. When the voters failed to come up with the “red wave” for which Republicans dreamed, they did happen to send a very different message of hope: Reproductive rights are making a comeback.

That was not necessarily supposed to happen, if you followed the conventional wisdom of pollsters and pundits in the days leading up to the midterms.

In the backlash immediately following the Supreme Court’s blockbuster Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision in June, Democrats saw a surge in support as the party that would more reliably work to restore abortion rights.

But those hopes began to fade as more recent polls showed abortion losing ground as a motivating issue for voters as Republicans hammered President Joe Biden’s approval ratings over such issues as runaway inflation — an unwelcome byproduct of the administration’s pandemic relief measures — and a perceived rise in crime rates.

Yet, Republicans stopped measuring the drapes for a Republican takeover when their red wave failed to materialize — and everyone’s attention turned to the question of “why?”

Sure, Democrats were expected to suffer losses of congressional seats because of the midterm curse that traditionally afflicts the party not occupying the White House. But this time, exit polls show, they avoided a rout largely because of an unexpected resurgence of fear and rage over abortion rights overturned by Dobbs.

“Abortion is on the line,” said Democrats, and in four states it quite literally was.

A record number of abortion-related proposals popped up on ballots this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Michigan, Vermont and California, voters in Tuesday’s elections overwhelmingly approved ballot initiatives that will enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitutions.

In traditionally conservative Kentucky, voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have protected the state’s near-total abortion ban from legal challenges.

And in Montana, voters rejected a measure that would have criminalized health care providers who do not make every effort to save the life of an infant “born during an attempted abortion” or after labor or Caesarean section.

Those stunning departures from conservative expectations followed an earlier surprise in Kansas, where voters in August decided overwhelmingly to reject a proposed amendment to remove protections for reproductive rights from the state’s constitution.

Some will see this apparent trend as a backhanded vindication of Justice Samuel Alito’s reasoning in Dobbs that abortion rights should be left up to the states. Yet, as critics, such as I, have argued, that states’ rights approach creates a confusing crazy-quilt patchwork of reproductive rights, an injustice to rights of women — rights too fundamental in my view to be dependent solely on which state you happen to be in.

That was the situation before Roe, the 1973 decision that infuriated abortion opponents enough to fuel the rise of a “right to life” movement and “Christian right” that since the 1970s has become one of the most effective and powerful organizing engines in the Republican Party.

Many have wondered ever since whether a similarly effective organizational engine might rise on the left if Roe was overturned. Maybe we’re seeing the answer now and it appears to be coming largely from generations too young to remember the days before Roe.

As one who remembers the days before Roe and what I saw as a terrible injustice to the right of women to have autonomy over their own bodies, I have long wondered how long it would take for younger voters, who usually have the lowest voter turnout, to wake up to this issue.

That day appears to have come. Abortion was the single-most important issue for a quarter of all voters in the midterms, according to Kaiser Health News, and for a third of women under age 50. NBC News exit polls placed the importance of abortion even higher, with 32% of voters saying inflation was their top voting issue and abortion ranking second at 27%.

As my own elders used to say, you don’t really appreciate something until you don’t have it any more.

Young folks should understand that message more forcefully after the Dobbs decision. They also should understand that rights, once won, must be watchfully protected. Otherwise, down the road, you can find yourselves fighting for the same rights all over again.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)