Abortion Showdowns

In the key states of Florida and Arizona, abortion is front and center again. And that’s bad news for the GOP.

Photo courtesy of Yahoo News

There are two big abortion rights developments I’m following.

First, in Florida, a six-week ban on abortions went into effect on Wednesday. Florida had been one of the few states in the South where women needing abortion care could still affordably travel to. That effectively ended at midnight yesterday. As I discuss below, clinics were overwhelmed with patients seeking to receive care before it became illegal. Many patients were even unaware that the six-week ban had been passed and would be in effect as of May 1st. 

This ban has big ramifications for the state’s politics. After the Florida Supreme Court narrowly approved the measure, Floridians will have a chance to vote this November to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution. The presence of the question on the ballot could be a major driver for turnout, particularly among women and younger voters. But because of Florida’s existing supermajority requirements for constitutional amendments, the amendment will need 60 percent of the vote to pass.

Second, in Arizona, the state senate narrowly repealed an 1864 law that banned all abortions within the state. The draconian law was authored by a single man and enacted 160 years ago by an all-white, all-male legislature, long before Arizona was even a state. But it sprung back into place after a ruling by the all-Republican Arizona Supreme Court, which held that the fall of Roe v. Wade meant that laws like this from the 1860s were still valid and on the books.

The repeal of the Civil War era ban nearly failed. All state senate Democrats had voted in favor, along with two Republicans who crossed the aisle to vote with them. As I’ll discuss in my piece, anti-abortion activists prayed, howled and pleaded, but in the end the political winds proved too strong. The repeal now goes to the governor’s desk for her signature.

Abortion rights remain popular in the state of Arizona, and there’s an election in November. Just as with Florida, in that same election there likely will be a ballot measure put to voters to enshrine abortion rights into the state’s constitution. A simple 50 percent majority could pass it.

Let’s take a closer look at these two stories. The way they unfolded tells us a lot about where we are politically, especially how vulnerable Republicans are on this issue and how voters, especially women, may be very angry about it all come November.

Heartbreak in Florida

When Gov. Ron DeSantis let his state know he had signed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans into law, he did so under cover of night, announcing that he had put his name on it at 11 pm the day it was enacted. 

The stealth tactic may have succeeded. Many women in need of abortion services in the state either didn’t know about the new, stricter limit, or otherwise believed they could still legally obtain an abortion up to May 1st so long as it hadn’t been six weeks. 

The Washington Post ran a wrenching story on the effect the ban had on women seeking abortion services in the state. I want to highlight one of them, which is representative of what many women are and will be going through.

Kristen is a mother of two who had just learned about the state’s ban and hastily arranged travel through friends to try to have the procedure done before the May 1 deadline. She thought she had made it in time, but she was wrong. As the Post reported,

“We did an ultrasound and you’re over the state limit,” said Eileen Diamond, the director of Benjamin Surgical Services International, gently explaining to Kristen that the test showed she was eight weeks pregnant.

While the clinic could still provide abortions for women more than six weeks into their pregnancies until midnight, Diamond said, another Florida law requires all abortion patients to have an ultrasound at least 24 hours before their procedure. That meant the earliest Kristen could get an abortion was Wednesday, when her abortion would no longer be legal.

“Oh no,” Kristen said, tears rolling down her cheeks as she sat across a desk from Diamond in a consultation room. “No. No.”

Kristen learned the nearest other clinic that could provide services for her was an 11-hour drive away in North Carolina.

Kristen shook her head. Then she looked at Diamond and laughed: With her financial situation, Diamond might as well have been suggesting she fly to the moon.

“I can’t afford three kids,” said Kristen, who like other women in this story spoke on the condition that only their first names be disclosed to protect their privacy. “But I’m not going out of state. I can’t afford to go out of state.”

Before the ban went into effect, there were around 80,000 abortions performed in Florida each year, or about 1 in 12 abortions nationwide. Florida is centrally located for women in the South, who often travel to the neighboring state for abortion services because their own states have far stricter laws.

With the six-week ban in effect, that is no longer the case, and the change will come as a jolt to women across the South. A six-week ban is particularly brutal and unfair because many pregnancies aren’t known or discovered until well past that point. And with additional requirements like the 24-hour prior ultrasound procedure, the timeline is even more unrealistically short and costly for women.

When I first posted on social media about the fact that many patients in Florida did not know about the ban, a good number of readers were shocked to hear it. This is a prime example, I believe, of how lower income and minority women, who typically have less access to information about changes in the law and their legal rights, will suffer the most under these kinds of bans. 

But word of mouth will travel quickly now. Stories like Kristen’s will be talked about privately, from friend to friend, mother to daughter, sister to sister. Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Florida on the day of the new ban going into effect to speak about its cruelty and about the loss of reproductive rights.

“We believe the government should never come between her and her doctor. Never,” Harris said, speaking of women seeking abortion care. She then laid the blame for the ban squarely upon Donald Trump, who brags regularly about having killed Roe. “Today, this very day, at the stroke of midnight, another Trump abortion ban went into effect here in Florida. As of this morning 4 million women in this state woke up with fewer reproductive freedoms than they did last night. This is the new reality under a Trump abortion ban.”

As the Florida abortion rights referendum approaches, with its anti-democratic 60 percent requirement, it will be more important than ever to ensure voters know what rights they have lost, who is responsible, and how to win those rights back.

High drama in Arizona

Right after the Arizona Supreme Court snapped an 1864 near-total abortion ban back into place, Democrats in the legislature began a campaign to repeal it. So long as the ban remained in effect, women across the state could be denied critical care. After all, even though the Democratic state Attorney General Kris Mayes, who won her race by just 280 votes out of 2.5 million votes cast, had pledged not to prosecute anyone under that law, many doctors and health providers didn’t want to take the risk that she would not win her next election.

First up was the Arizona House, where Democratic efforts to repeal the ban were blocked twice by Republicans, to the shouts of “Shame!” from progressive legislators. The votes were razor thin, with each attempt a 30-30 tie, with one Republican voting with the Democrats. The ties had to be broken by the GOP Speaker. 

The votes were observed in person by a crowd of anti-abortion activists, who packed the galley and sang “Amazing Grace” while also shouting “Shame on you!” at legislators as they gathered for the morning sessions.

Democrats used the failed votes to repeal the abortion ban to press their case that voters needed to return the legislature to Democratic hands. The abortion wedge, now driven deep into the GOP, grew evident in the final vote in the House as three Republicans, who were worried about swing voters in the upcoming election, crossed party lines to vote with all 29 of the House Democrats in support of the repeal. 

Their colleagues were displeased. “I am disgusted today,” state Rep. Rachel Jones (R) said. “Life is one of the tenets of our Republican platform. To see people go back on that value is egregious to me.” After the vote, the GOP House speaker meted out punishment, removing one of the crossover voters from a plum assignment on the House Appropriations Committee.

Then it was on to the Arizona state senate, which was also narrowly controlled by the GOP. There, it was again two Republican crossover votes plus a united Democratic caucus that led to passage of the repeal. In an ironic twist, one of those senators, Shawnna Bolick, is married to one of the Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold the ban. When she took to the floor, according to the New York Times, she provided a personal account of her own pregnancy journeys, including one where she obtained an abortion because the fetus was not viable.

“Would Arizona’s pre-Roe law have allowed me to have this medical procedure even though my life wasn’t in danger?” she asked. The anti-abortion activists jeered her. “Come on!” “This is a disgrace!” “One day you will face a just and holy God!” they cried.

Bolick tried to argue that repealing the ban actually would provide the best shot at stopping the momentum of the ballot measure that could enshrine Roe into the state’s constitution. This is the same needle that current senate candidate and failed gubernatorial Trump VP wannabe Kari Lake (Q-Pluto) has also attempted to thread to help explain her recent flip flops on first supporting the ban, then condemning it after she realized what a political loser it was.

Religious extremists hold outsized sway within the GOP legislature in Arizona. During debate on the repeal, radical senators made that abundantly clear. Reported the New York Times,

Several anti-abortion Republican lawmakers made fiery speeches that framed the vote in spiritual terms. They equated abortions to Naziism and compared the repeal with the Sept. 11 attacks. They read graphic descriptions of later-term abortions. They quoted the Bible and made direct appeals to God from the Senate floor.

The abortion debates have served to highlight the state GOP’s support of extremism in the name of religion. That could figure heavily among moderate swing voters in the upcoming election. Such voters were the reason many extremist candidates lost across the board in Arizona in the 2022 midterms. 

And while the 1864 ban has been repealed, as legal analyst Chris Geidner notes in his newsletter, the ban might still go into effect for a time because its repeal doesn’t take effect until August. (To force it to take effect under an emergency basis would have required a two-thirds vote in support.) 

That means unless the state supreme court somehow delays its mandate (meaning, instructions) to the trial court to enforce the ban, the state and its women could find themselves governed by that 160-year old law for a period of time.

All this shines further light on the importance of the upcoming abortion rights ballot measure, which now has more than enough signatures to qualify to appear this November, assuming it doesn’t somehow get blocked in court. As I noted in my earlier piece on Arizona, abortion rights could be a major driver of turnout and could have major effects up and down the ticket. At stake is the House majority in Congress in two key swing districts in Maricopa and Pima counties, the Senate majority should Ruben Gallego defeat Kari Lake, and even the White House with Arizona’s 11 electoral votes—one more than Wisconsin if you’re counting.

Arizona and Florida demonstrate that the GOP cannot run from the abortion question. Each week, some new wrinkle or fallout from Dobbs will arise and make new headlines. Republicans know that abortion rights and the fight against extremism were the reasons Democrats prevailed in so many races in 2022, managing even to hold the Senate against most predictions. They are also starting to realize that they have made the election very personal to tens of millions of abortion rights voters, but the extremists in their own party just don’t care. 

Come November, the GOP may come to deeply regret having ever gotten what it wished for by stripping away 50 years of abortion rights.