The NPR Politics Podcast - A Majority of Americans Support Roe. That Doesn't Mean They Agree on Abortion.

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Senate Democrats failed to pass a bill that would have codified the right to an abortion Wednesday, with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin voting with all Republicans in opposition. Polls show a majority of Americans support Roe V. Wade, but opinions vary widely when it comes to restrictions like waiting periods, required ultrasounds, and gestational cutoffs. Also, we look at how different religions define the beginning of life, and what that means for the thorny political debate on abortion. This episode: White House Correspondent Scott Detrow, congressional correspondent Susan Davis, and national correspondent Susan Davis. Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Phil, a very tired band director in St. Petersburg, Florida, where I just finished my spring concert with my 200 band kids. This podcast was recorded at... Way to go, Phil and Phil's Band. It is 1251 Eastern on Thursday, May 12th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I will probably still be very tired. Enjoy the show. Were you a band kid, Scott? I was not, but I'm surrounded by them in my life. Were you? No, I wasn't, but I kind of wish I was, because I feel like band kids have more fun than I

realized when I was a kid. Sarah McCammon is joining us today, and I feel like odds are possibly she was. Sarah? So this is a complex answer. There was a three-way tie in sixth grade band for first chair flute, and I was one of the first chair flutes. There were only five of us, so I feel kind of bad about that on so many levels. And then I just did choir for the rest of my musical career. That counts. That counts. Thank you. We should fully introduce ourselves. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I should fully introduce ourselves. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

I was not in band. I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress, and neither was I. And I'm Sarah McCammon. I was only briefly in band. I cover abortion rights for NPR. And today, we are talking about the recent vote in the Senate. Senate Democrats tried to pass a bill to codify the right to an abortion in the United States. It failed on a 49 to 51 vote with Democrat Joe Manchin voting with Republicans against it.

Sue, yet another symbolic stand and failed vote on an issue that Democrats view as existentially important. Why did they do this when they knew it would fail? And what happens next? I mean, it's a very common strategy that we've seen, right, where we have these symbolic votes in the Senate when they can't move on big issues. And this really wasn't any different. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was pretty plain spoken on the Senate floor. He basically said they were having this vote to create political pressure on Republicans and to put everyone on record going into the midterm elections. I mean, that's really the only tool Democrats have

in the short term is to try to build up political pressure to try to hold one or both chambers of Congress, maybe try to grow the Senate majority to have more votes in favor of abortion rights. But frankly, Scott, there's still a long way from having the kind of votes they would need to actually enact the change that most Democrats support. Yeah. So we're going to talk about three senators. We talk about a lot of the times from issue to issue. They seem to be the main players here.

But there are a couple Republicans who support abortion rights, specifically Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Where did they vote on this bill and what happens with them next? And does it matter? Well, they voted against it, but they obviously support abortion rights. And they have competing legislation that would also codify Roe. It's a more conservative measure. They say that it more expressly carves out protections for people who have religious or moral objections to abortion. Democrats will say that their bill also had similar protections, but Collins says her bill does it more clearly and in a way that she can support. And that reservation was shared by Joe Manchin. Look, Joe Manchin is a Democrat

who supports abortion rights. He said yesterday he would vote to codify Roe. His issue with the way that Democrats put their bill together, and this was similarly echoed by the two Republican women, is that the way it was drafted, it would supersede additional state laws on the books that are restrictions around abortion procedures. A lot of states have things like requirements for waiting periods or ultrasounds before they can be performed or laws that dictate who can or cannot perform abortions. And Manchin's quite comfortable with those. And he was uncomfortable with kind of any big sweeping federal legislation that would knock those kind of laws off the books. And that leads to a question for you, Sarah. This is, of course, a complex and nuanced issue. And polls are not necessarily the best way to get a measure of how people feel about complex and nuanced issues. But as best as we can tell, where is national support for some sort of restrictions or some sort of qualifications on abortion access compared to

what Senate Democrats wanted to do here? I mean, so much of this comes down to the way you ask these questions. Yeah, there are some things I can say pretty broadly about abortion polling, which is that, you know, most Americans think there should be some restrictions on abortion. Most Americans don't think abortion should always be illegal. Okay, so but that leaves a lot of ambiguity in between. And then when it comes to some of these state level restrictions that Sue was talking about, you know, things like waiting periods, sometimes it's 24 hours, sometimes it's 72 hours from the time a patient first gets an appointment at a clinic to when they can get the procedure, things like mandatory ultrasounds. Also, you know, laws like

parental notification or consent for minors who get abortions. Many of those measures have a fair amount of public support, especially things like I'm looking at a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from a couple of years ago. 70% of independents supported requiring women to wait 24 hours between meeting with a health care provider and getting an abortion. An overwhelming majority of Republicans, as you might expect, supported that and half of Democrats. Now, you know, while there may be some public support for things like waiting periods, it doesn't mean they're medically necessary. But to Sue's point, some of some of the proposals, the national proposals from Democrats would strip away some of those, you know, sort of caveats that voters tend to favor. And that's definitely been a

talking point from abortion rights opponents this week. So Sue, it is becoming clear, and you're hearing this from President Biden, he did several fundraisers this week, and it seems like kind of his political message for the fall is coming together. And it's you got to elect more Democrats, more Democrats, and we can get this done, more Democrats, and we can pass these things have been stalled. I feel like, you know, you can explain narrow majorities. You can explain a evenly divided Senate to people over and over and over again. But I feel like increasingly, you know, elect us because we tried to pass voting rights and failed. We tried to pass voting rights and failed. We tried to pass climate change and failed. We tried to protect abortion access and we failed. So vote for us

feels like it's maybe not the best message. You know, there's been a lot of reaction to this leaked draft about sort of outrage within the ranks. I think that there's just this like shock and anger factor among activists and democratic voters, and even frankly, democratic lawmakers that this is happening. But I think they're also going to have to contend to some of that internal angst. Like, where were you all? Where have you been working? Like the Republican Party and the conservative activism that has led to this moment was so coordinated and so energized. And I think that there is going to be a lot of anger towards the Democratic Party writ large that they even got to

this point. Yeah. The other thing I would say about that is that a majority of voters do support Roe, a pretty solid majority, 70% or so, depending on which poll you look at. So the way Roe is written, you know, it's not abortion up to the moment of birth, as it's sometimes claimed to be. There are restrictions, there's room for states to restrict, particularly later in pregnancy, and voters support that. So if that goes away, and if about half the country bans abortion, these activists are really hoping it will be a wake up call to voters. You know, I was on a call last week with some of the major abortion rights groups, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, right after this draft opinion leaked. And I sensed a bit of frustration from some of these activists that, you know, they said, we've been

trying to tell people for years that this could happen, but they do believe it really will be a wake-up call for base voters that, you know, this is real now. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, Sarah, we're going to talk about more of your recent reporting on all of this. And we are back. Sarah, brace yourself, because I'm going to say something nice about you.

I truly think that you cover the convergence of religion and politics and what is happening right now with abortion and reproductive rights better than any other reporter in the country. And you've been doing it for years. Thank you, Scott. It is a true statement I have said to many people for a long time. Let's talk about religion and abortion here, because the question of when life begins is such a key driver for so many people who oppose abortion. And it often comes down to a religious question.

Yeah. And I want to start off by saying, you know, yes, we live in a country with separation of church and state, and, you know, I'm not suggesting that we should legislate based on religion, but the reason I wanted to unpack this question is because it does, whether we like it or not, whether we want it to or not, it sort of infuses so many of these debates. But in a country with separation of church and state, a lot of people who don't share those particular religious beliefs find that disturbing when they start to infuse legislation and infuse public policy. And what really got me curious about this was something that Justice Sonia Sotomayor said back in December during the oral arguments for the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, she was in a dialogue with the Solicitor General from

Mississippi who's defending the 15-week ban. And she asked him, essentially, isn't this question of when life begins, isn't it fundamentally a religious question? And really, the question underneath that is, when does human life have moral values and when should it have legal significance? When is a person a person? I thought your recent story really articulated this really clearly, and I learned a lot from it. I'm Catholic, and the belief that I was taught growing up is that life begins at the moment of conception.

And you lay out the fact that many religions view that very differently. Yeah, it's fascinating. And I want to say, first of all, I'm not a theologian. I'm not a clergy person. And many of the clergy you'll talk to from different faiths will have somewhat different views. But broadly, something that came up a lot in my reporting was that, for example, Judaism takes a very different view. Certainly not all people of the Jewish faith, but there is a lot of emphasis on the, you know, on the first breath being when life begins or when a person becomes a person. You know, I was in Kentucky reporting on some abortion restrictions there recently, and I met a woman named Caitlin. She's Jewish, and she told

me a story about a really difficult decision she faced last year. You know, one of these situations that too many people find themselves in, where a wanted pregnancy is just not going to be viable. And, you know, she talked to me about how her faith informed the way she thought about that. And it sort of comforted her and helped her make the decision about what to do with that pregnancy. God has offered me a solution to my suffering, which is, you have medical options available to you to end this pregnancy. God has offered me a solution to my suffering, which is you have medical options available to you to end this pregnancy. I spoke to a Muslim feminist scholar about this and heard something similar, just that there's an emphasis, she said, on the mother's life, on preserving the

mother's life more than the question of when does a life begin, you know, in the womb. And she said that that is fundamentally, as she saw it, you know, the framing of that question comes from Christianity and particularly white evangelical Christianity. And we can talk about Christianity, Scott. It's the largest religion in this country, right? And within Christianity, as you know, there's a huge range of views, even among Catholics whose church, as you said, traditionally believes that human life begins at conception. If you poll American Catholics, they don't necessarily side with their church on that. Right. So how do you see, I guess this is another question that could fill a 45-minute podcast, but how do you see these various beliefs and predominantly the strain of white evangelical

Christianity that has ingrained itself in the Republican Party in so many ways. How do you see that playing out on Capitol Hill when it comes to this debate? Well, I think a lot of members of Congress are also hugely faithful, but I think that they come down on this question very differently. There are many white evangelical Christians in the Republican Party, and that's very much reflected in the representation in Congress. But then you also have people like Joe Biden, like Nancy Pelosi. I mean, their Catholicism and their faith have been so central to their political rise in their life story. And Pelosi has said time and time again, because she's always been very liberal on abortion rights, and has always been an activist for the cause, that at one point in one debate many years ago, a Republican lawmaker said to her, you think you know more about having babies than the Pope?

And she was like, yeah, I do. I've had five of them. Like the Pope hasn't had any babies. Pope's had zero babies. Yeah, like she tells that story a lot. I think people can have profoundly held faith views and come to very different conclusions on this question. And I also would think, and Sarah has also reported on evangelical politics, in the US specifically, white evangelical politics have become so much more entwined with, you know,

electoral politics than probably almost any other faith. And white evangelical politics and the overlap in the Republican Party, I think is so much greater than any other faith group in the Democratic Party. Yeah, that's a big part of it. I mean, basically, what you have is white evangelicals, a majority about 70% say that abortion should always or mostly be illegal. So that's out of step with public opinion. But white evangelical Christians have, you know, frankly, outsized power per capita in this country at this time because of that dominance of the Republican base. So even though white evangelical Christians are somewhere between 15 and 20% of the country, depending on which poll you look at, it has outsized influence. Well, Sarah McCammon, I have a sneaky suspicion

you will be on the podcast many, many times over the next few months. Thanks for joining us today. My pleasure. Anytime. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Susan Davis. I cover Congress. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow.