Is Abortion a "Losing Issue" for Republicans?

Maybe. But the Dems position is also more extreme than that held by most on the left

I support legal abortion without exceptions because I believe the right to individual bodily autonomy should always take precedence over any legal duty to protect potential or actual persons. Even if a fetus were given the rights of a legal person, forcing a woman to continue a pregnancy would still not be justified. In no other situation do we require a person to sacrifice their body or health for the life of another, even when they’re responsible for that other person existing and/or being in danger. As an extreme example, we don’t require a parent to donate an organ to save their own child, even if they caused the child's injury through drunk driving or some other morally condemned or illegal action. We would expect them to do so and morally condemn them if they didn’t but the decision is ultimately their own. 

As Richard Hanania has pointed out, the seemingly “common sense” position, shared by a majority of Americans, that early in pregnancy abortions should be legal while late in pregnancy abortions should be illegal, typically barring a few exceptions (such as danger to the mother’s life, fetal abnormalities, rape), requires agreement on a whole host of questions along which individual opinions will vary. For example, he points out that we’d have to agree on what constitutes a “sufficiently high” risk to the mother’s life to justify a late in pregnancy abortion if doctors and patients are to be sure that a given procedure won’t result in legal recrimination. That said, several other countries, including the UK, have seemingly been able to navigate abortion restrictions with these sorts of exceptions, but given that the US context includes a very motivated anti-abortion minority it’s possible such exceptions could be more of a challenge to interpret than they have been in Europe. 

Still, while I think these are good arguments, and while I think they might convince some people who are currently in favor of “moderate” abortion restrictions that they come with more problems than they’re worth, when polled a large minority of all Americans (and a majority of Republicans) say they think that abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. Only 19% of Americans polled, and 30% of Democrats, hold the position that I (and Hanania) promote, that abortion should be legal in all cases.

Pew Research Center. (2022, May 6). America’s abortion quandary. Similar results were found in an AP-NORC poll where 56% of respondents said abortion should be mostly legal and 43% said it should be mostly illegal. 56% said it should sometimes be legal and other times illegal.

The clearly mainstream position is that abortion should be legal in some cases and illegal in others, and most Americans (56% according to Pew) think that duration of the pregnancy should be relevant to legality. Of course this so-called “majority” view, in favor of moderate restrictions, is not something we could directly implement since it contains many conflicting views: at what week of pregnancy we should make abortion illegal? or (as we touched on before) what should be the criteria for exceptions to allow abortions after that point? Interestingly, although this issue is sometimes presented as one of men trying to control women’s bodies, there’s basically no difference in the average views of American men and women in these polls:

Pew Research Center. (2022, May 6). America’s abortion quandary. 

Women may have slightly stronger views on abortion than men - marginally more women say it should be legal in *all* circumstances (21% vs. 17%) and marginally more also say it should be illegal in *all* circumstances (9% vs. 8%) and the Pew report notes that “women are more likely than men to say they have thought “a lot” about abortion (40% vs. 30%)”. But overall the gender differences are small. So while I personally see abortion access as a fundamental right, I think presenting it as being motivated by men who want to control women’s bodies is almost entirely unfair. The debate on this issue is about whether you think fetuses deserve the rights of personhood at any point before exiting the mother’s body, as well as how you rank the right to personal bodily autonomy relative to the right to life. 

Richard Hanania and others have claimed that abortion is a losing issue for Republicans, citing key races and specific poll questions which seem to indicate little support for more extreme bans. But while it may be true that Republican representatives often present (or try to enact) policy goals which would restrict abortion beyond what most of their constituents would support, the reverse also seems to be true on the Democratic side of the aisle. In Democratic states like New York, abortion is essentially legal with no exceptions, a position which, as noted above, is only supported by 30% of Democrats.

Oh, and no, it’s not just a right-wing myth that women get late in pregnancy abortions for reasons unrelated to the mother or baby’s health. The data on these abortions and the percentage of them that are done for medical reasons is very poor. But as I noted in my piece Pro-Choice Anti-Abortion, my reading of the limited discussion I could find on this is that a substantial portion of these abortions are likely done for “voluntary” reasons. There are about 4000 abortions per year that happen later than 21 weeks into pregnancy, and as I noted in the previously referenced piece, “for people that agree that late in pregnancy abortions are on a spectrum with infanticide, noting that there are “only” 4,000 per year isn’t a convincing reason to ignore the issue.” The orange bars below indicate reasons given by women who got an abortion more than 20 weeks into pregnancy as to why they delayed:

Kaiser Family Foundation. “Abortions Later in Pregnancy.” KFF, 5 Dec. 2019

So, to conclude. Maybe abortion is a “losing issue” for republicans, but both parties support positions which are more extreme than the (polled) preferences of their party members. And while they only make up <1% of all abortions, there are ~4000 late in pregnancy abortions per year in the US and at least some of these are done for “voluntary” reasons.