The Decibel - Abortion rights’ impact on the Republican wave

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Republicans were expected to dominate the midterm elections, but the anticipated ‘red wave’ did not pan out. Democrats did better than expected and some of that is being attributed to the support for abortion rights across the country. NBC News exit polls report that the largest number of people said inflation was the deciding issue for their vote – with abortion coming in a close second.Rosemary Westwood is a public health reporter in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the host of a podcast called Banned, about the battle over abortion rights in the deep south. She explains what happened at the midterms and what it means for the future of abortion rights in the U.S.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Maina Karaman-Welms, and you're listening to The Decibel. The U.S. midterm elections were held Tuesday, and for the Republican Party, which was expecting a red wave of sweeping support, the results were disappointing. Republicans are still poised to take the House of Representatives, but the Democrats won more races than anticipated. And some of that might come down to the party's campaign for abortion rights. Today, journalist Rosemary Westwood is back on the show. She's a public health reporter in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the host of a podcast called Banned, about the battle over abortion rights in the Deep South. She'll tell us what the midterms mean for the future of reproductive

rights in the U.S. This is The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. Rosemary, thank you so much for joining us again. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So we're talking on Wednesday morning, the day after the midterms. What sense do we have at this point about how important the issue of abortion access was overall at a national level in the midterm elections? Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that abortion was a driving factor of especially Democratic turnout. And that's what, you know, abortion rights advocates and Democrats had been hoping we would see. So there were a number of significant victories for abortion rights in a number of states. And at the same time, because there's still so much uncertainty

about control of the House and Senate right now, many people are looking at that as another indication of support for abortion rights. Roe versus Wade was overturned in June, and there was a feeling at the time that access to abortion would be the defining issue of the midterms. But as time went on, you know, conversations about the economy became more pronounced, other things came up. Why is it that the economy ended up kind of being a defining issue for a lot of people? I think there's two answers to that. And the first is just very practical, like someone needs to go grocery shopping pretty regularly. Every week, say you don't need an abortion every week. People you know don't need

abortions every week. So there's just an immediacy and an intimacy of the issue of inflation. I do think that we have for so long siphoned off the issue of abortion. One of my sources called it abortion land. She's like, we can't keep the issue of abortion off in abortion land forever. You know, we have to tie it into all of these other things that people care about. You care about the economy and economic issues. Well, if you're someone who's about to have a kid, there's no bigger economic decision that you could make, say for, say, buying a house or something. You know, having a child is a lifelong economic issue.

You know, even just giving birth is because depending on where you are with health insurance, that's tens of thousands of dollars. So everything is connected, I think, to the issue of abortion. Certainly abortion rights activists believe that. But the anti-abortion movement and Democrats have allowed it to be sort of off in this corner where we don't really need to think about it or talk about it unless it's your one issue that sends you to the polls. And what we saw in this election is like, actually, you know, first of all, it can be a motivating factor for Democrats to get them to the polls rather than just Republicans, which is what was happening in the past. But also that people, I think, are seeing it as interconnected. I think people are beginning to draw those connections. And after Roe was overturned, the number of women registered to vote did surge.

Do we know if those numbers, though, actually translated into voting on Tuesday? We do know that women actually swung a bit back towards the Republican Party, especially white women in these midterms. We do know that from polling that abortion was a motivating issue more for women than for men, though, especially among Democrats. I haven't seen polls that show that women voters were the ones that drove the Democrats to success here or potentially to success. You know, the fact that suburban voters, women, white women were trickling back to the Republican Party sort of undermines the idea that all women are going to go out there and support abortion rights. You, of course, have done a lot of reporting on reproductive rights, including hosting a podcast that told the story of the Mississippi case that did overturn Roe v. Wade. I guess, what were you thinking or feeling when you were seeing these results? I think the big thing we were looking at, really, for people interested in how abortion drives voting is the referendums that were held in a number of states, the ballot

measures that were either looking to entrench support for abortion rights in state constitutions or weaken those or in some other way, try to enhance anti-abortion views within state constitutions. So those were key. And in every single one of those, voters sided with abortion rights, even in states with strong Republican politics. But the flip side of that, Kentucky is a really good one to look at. So Kentucky, there was a ballot question that was asking voters whether they wanted to prevent the state constitution from finding a right to abortion in some kind of Roe versus Wade type decision at the state level. And voters pretty resoundingly said, no, no, we do not want

our state constitution to prevent abortion rights. Yet more voters supported Rand Paul for Senate. Who is a Republican, of course. Yes. Who's a Republican. So it seems as if Republican voters are not in lockstep potentially with their party on this issue. However, they are still happy to vote in Republicans who are anti-abortion. And that is really meaningful because it shows Republicans that they can maintain sort of the extreme anti-abortion position that almost no abortion should be allowed only to save the life of the mother, not in cases of rape and incest, and in many states, not in cases of pregnancies where the

fetus is going to die, so that they can support these sort of extreme views and they won't face any repercussions in the polls, even when their base or their own voters disagree with them. So in terms of what that means for anti-abortion politics, it still means that the Republicans can be full throated in their support for abortion bans and face almost no repercussions, you would think, in a state like Kentucky. At other state levels as well, this was also an issue. Michigan is one of five states where abortion access was directly on the ballot as well. But it was a different question. It was framed differently. Can you tell us what voters were deciding on in Michigan? Yeah, voters were deciding on whether to enshrine reproductive health protections into their state constitution, and whether to say that the state constitution protects reproductive freedom, including all matters related to

pregnancy. And so that was hugely supportive. 56% of the vote supported that in Michigan. That was a strong win. And so in general, I think we've seen a huge defeat on an issue-specific basis for the anti-abortion movement. We'll be back in a moment. It seems like at the state level, there's actually a fair bit happening here. And I want to ask you about Louisiana because you, of course, are in Louisiana, has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. The Republican incumbent, Congressman Steve Scalise, did win. But there was a woman, Katie Darling, who was running against him. And she tried to connect people with reproductive issues in a pretty unique way, I will say.

Can you tell me about Katie Darling? Yeah. So Katie Darling is a first-time politician, and she actually got into the race after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That was really the motivating moment for her. She was pregnant, and she, because of many health issues, carries high risk pregnancies and she's suffered many miscarriages in the past. And she was afraid for her own health, that if something went wrong in her pregnancy, would her physicians feel confident that they could care for her in the way they thought best without being criminalized by the law. In Louisiana, our abortion ban seeks between 10 and 20 years in jail for people who provide illegal abortions and strips them of their medical license in addition to high fees. So, you know, as she was putting together her campaign,

there was this thought within the campaign, what if we make me, you know, from her perspective, me and my own birth part of the story? We should be putting pregnant women at ease, not putting their lives at risk. I haven't spent my career in Washington. So what they did is they had cameras rolling as she went into labor, as she drove to the hospital, as she got into a bed to deliver, as she was laboring, like you were watching her pushing. And then there was images of her, you know, newly born son.

Because I want that better path for you, for her, and for him. And throughout that sort of montage of visuals, you're hearing her talk about her concerns for women's health. To my knowledge and to the knowledge of everyone I've spoken to, there's never been a candidate who's given birth in a political ad in the United States. I found it totally shocking. And it definitely made waves. It went viral. It did not help her get elected. Yeah.

But if you said it went viral and people were watching it, it sounds like, I guess, did it have an impact on the broader discussion, maybe at least in the state? I think it shows just how much people who support abortion rights are willing to start getting real about that and putting themselves on the line, putting their stories on the line, putting their bodies on the line. So, so, so many more politicians are talking about their own abortions than ever would have before. You know, so many more people in general are willing to talk about this issue than would have before because they realize that what they thought might have been a done deal, that Roe

versus Wade was just there forever, you know, wasn't true. And we're now having to deal with the consequences. When we last had you on the show, it was just a few days after Roe v. Wade was overturned. How has the overturning of Roe v. Wade played out since we last talked to you? Like, how has access to abortion changed across the country? Well, there are 14 states that have banned nearly all abortions. And for people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, you're having to travel hundreds of miles, many states away in order to access an abortion. Overall, though, we've also seen that abortions have dipped significantly. In the two months after Roe versus Wade was overturned, the total number of

abortions dropped by 10,000 in the US. We don't know whether some of those people might have accessed medication abortion. Those are numbers taken from abortion clinics. But we do know that there are going to be thousands more people carrying pregnancies to term just in the two months after Roe versus Wade was overturned. In Louisiana, the state's abortion clinics closed on August 1st. Since then, there has been no legal access in the state. We know medication abortion requests have spiked dramatically in Louisiana, almost more than any other state. And we also have a real crisis in our hospitals right now because this law targets physicians. And the way that it tries to keep abortions banned is not by criminalizing women. It's by criminalizing doctors. That puts physicians in hospitals who almost never did elective abortions in a kind of

like legal nightmare, really. Now they have to worry if they intervene early in a situation, earlier than the law might allow, say someone's life is in an immediate risk, or maybe somebody's miscarrying, but their fetus still has a heartbeat. You know, physicians don't know when they can act. And I talked to doctors who are convinced that in the end, people will lose their lives, not because necessarily it's always that the care is withheld, but maybe it's delayed to a point that's dangerous. I've talked to a woman who was miscarrying a few weeks ago, and she kept going to ERs looking for help. And she kept getting turned away. And one doctor said she'd pray for her. And someone else said, well, keep coming back if you bleed enough. And she was like,

what does bleeding enough mean? And she couldn't get an answer. And we know that our law allows for terminations. If the fetus is deemed too sick to survive, something called medically futile, essentially means that it's incompatible with life. And there are a number, like hundreds, some doctors say, of conditions that could contribute to this kind of diagnosis. So there are people who are supposed to be able to get abortions in those cases. And even those people are having to travel out of state sometimes. There was one case that made headlines where the woman was carrying a fetus with no brain or skull, and she was denied an abortion at the hospital she sought care at in Baton Rouge. Wow. Yeah. I mean, when we talk about those individual stories, that really hits home, right? The results of these laws.

I wonder, where does all of this leave advocates for abortion rights? After these midterms, what have I guess some of the people that you've talked to, what have they told you about what they'll be doing to bolster abortion rights going forward? I think it really depends on where you are in the country. Like I think at a national level, abortion rights advocates are very happy today. Like they will take what they can get. And they got a lot. They got all of these ballot measures swung in their direction. A lot of governor races swung in their direction, protecting abortion rights in states where state legislatures might have tried to enact bans. You know, overall, the confusion, I guess, over who's going to take control shows that abortion rights were important in this election and that they're a winnable issue essentially for Democrats. So it's sort of a doubling down on not just this midterm election, but every election after the Democrats should focus on abortion as a key strategy, which they have not done in the past. There's been a

huge imbalance between Republicans focusing on being anti-abortion and Democrats not focusing all that much on supporting abortion rights. So I think that will be key. But in places like Louisiana, where I live, in over a dozen states where abortion is banned and the anti-abortion movement controls the state politics, it's a lot less hopeful, I think. And activists I've spoken with are concerned about, well, if we got a little bit more voter turnout in some county or parish that we weren't expecting, can we turn that into more of a movement? Oh, can we just even get people to say the word abortion? They're starting really at the ground level in trying to build a movement that could undo what the anti-abortion movement has done, what it took five decades to accomplish.

And they're also trying to ensure protections for contraception. They're trying to ensure protections for IVF. They're trying to ensure access to reproductive health care in states with extremely high maternal and infant mortality rates. Now that more people are going to be forced to have babies, there are just a number of sort of fires, I think, that they would be looking to put out in the areas surrounding this because they have no hope of restoring abortion access in the short term. Rosemary, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. My pleasure. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White,

Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.