One year post-Roe: Where top presidential candidates stand on abortion
Published 2:09 pm Wednesday, June 28, 2023
In the year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections, restrictions and access to abortion continue to be debated.
While Democrats, including President Joe Biden, continue to push for a woman’s right to choose and support federal abortion protections, Republicans currently have narrow majority in the House of Representatives, which could block that from happening.
The GOP continues to support the court’s June 24, 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that turned abortion rights over to the states, resulting in a wave GOP-led states banning or restricting abortion access.
Amid the one-year anniversary of the controversial decision, abortion again was at the center of talking points among politicians, particularly among the crowded field on 2024 GOP presidential candidates.
Former President Donald Trump, the apparent GOP frontrunner, has taken credit for Supreme Court’s decision. During his one-term, he added to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority through his appointments of Amy Coney Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, all of who voted with thee other justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, a 1972 Supreme Court decision protecting woman’s choice to an abortion.
Trump’s recent boasts of his role in the Supreme Court decision, however, has been contradictory to claims he made after Republican losses in November 2022 midterm elections in key battleground states. He attributed the losses to Republicans’ tough stances on abortion.
“It was the ‘abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.
Months prior to the Dobbs decision, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — a top contender to Trump in the crowded GOP races for president — signed a bill banning abortion past 15 weeks. After the Supreme Court ruling, however, DeSantis went further by limiting abortions to six weeks in April this year, which Trump said in a May media interview was “too harsh.” The new law is pending as it is being challenged in court.
States with six-week abortion bans, aside from total bans, are among the strictest in the country as many opponents argue that most women don’t know they are pregnant at six weeks. Proponents of the strict bans have argued that a fetal heartbeat can be detected at six weeks and advocate for a fetus’s right to life.
Medical professionals have said viability — used to indicate when the fetus can survive outside the womb — is in general, near 24 weeks.
Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, has challenged other GOP presidential candidates to support a minimum federal 15-week abortion ban during his speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington.
“We must not rest and we must not relent until we restore the sanctity of life to the center of American law in every state in this country,” he said at the June 23 conference.
Nikki Haley, former United Nations ambassador, has been vocal in her support of cracking down on late-term abortions.
As South Carolina governor, she signed a law in 2016 that banned abortions in in the state 20 weeks, however, since the Dobbs decision, she has not been specific on whether she would support tighter restrictions and on the federal level if elected president, though she previously indicated it could be hard to do so in Congress.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who is also among the handful of top-polling Republican hopefuls for the country’s top seat in 2024, said he supports federal abortion restrictions but would allow Congress to have the final say if he’s elected president.
“I am 100 percent pro-life. When I am president of the United States, I will sign the most pro-life legislation the House and Senate can put on my desk,” he said in an op-ed for Des Moines Register. “We should begin with a 15-week national limit.”
A Gallup poll conducted May 1-24 compared its findings to its poll conducted May 2-22, 2022, after a leaked draft of the Dobbs opinion showed that the court planned to overturn federal protections for abortion.
The poll indicates that 17% of all voters in 2022 and 2023 have said they are pro-choice on abortion and will only vote for candidates who share their views on the issue, compared to only 10 percent of voters in both years have said they are pro-life on abortion and will only back candidates who share their views.
Currently, 33% of registered voters who identify as pro-choice versus 23% of pro-life voters say they will only vote for a candidate who agrees with them on abortion.
“This advantage for the pro-choice side is new since last year,” Lydia Saad summarized in the Gallup report.
More than a dozen states — including Alabama, and majority of states across the South — have banned abortion with very limited exceptions. The Georgia Supreme Court has allowed Georgia’s law banning abortions most abortions past six weeks of pregnancy to be in affect while they make a determination into the validity of the law. A six-week abortion ban is either pending or has been successfully blocked in a handful of other states.
Democrat Georgia Rep. Ruwa Romman called abortion bans dangerous for women, as many women now have to travel “hundreds of miles to receive care.”
