In the United States, Republican radio silence on abortion

April 11, 2023

Not a word from Donald Trump or the tenors of the party: the suspension of the abortion pill in the United States was greeted by an unusual silence in the Republican camp, aware that positions that are too extreme are starting to cost dearly at the ballot box.

A vote by the so-conservative Kansas to protect access to abortion. A disappointment in a ballot in the State of New York. An extremely disappointing score in the midterm elections — despite runaway inflation, attributed to the Biden administration.

For several months, the lights have been red for the Republican Party.

The landslide victory last week of a pro-abortion-rights judge elected to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin — a state that sent Donald Trump to the White House in 2016 — had the effect of a warning shot.

The decision of the very conservative Supreme Court of the United States to blow up the right to abortion last June has put this question back at the heart of the country’s political debates.

However, according to the polls, Americans are now at least 60% to want to protect access to voluntary termination of pregnancy.

So when a Texas judge decided on Good Friday evening to suspend the abortion pill in the United States, the party leadership, which has long used this issue to electrify its religious base, for the first time preferred to be silent.

Only the very conservative Mike Pence, darling of evangelical circles, came out of the woodwork, welcoming a decision which “repairs a 20-year-old error”, when this stamp had been authorized by the health authorities.

“I bet a lot of Republicans would like the issue of abortion rights to quietly disappear,” David Axelrod, a former adviser to Barack Obama, tweeted. “They are caught in their own trap.”

On the other side, quite the opposite. The Democrats therefore did not waste a minute to criticize the judgment denouncing a dangerous decision for women’s rights. And were quick to attribute the decision of the Texas judge, appointed by Donald Trump, directly to the former president, who could face Joe Biden again in November 2024.

“Let’s be clear: we’re talking about the Republicans’ goal here of banning abortion nationwide,” thundered Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer, criticizing a “Trumpist agenda.”

If the Republicans have long replied by accusing the Democrats of wanting to offer “abortions on demand”, the first voices are now rising in the “Grand Old Party” to call for an urgent change of course.

“We were insensitive and we got lost,” moderate Republican Nancy Mace warned Monday.

“If we showed people that we care about them, we would be in a much better position to convince them that our ideas are better,” she pleaded on Twitter.

But these calls are currently coming up against the string of bills completely banning abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, adopted in recent months in local assemblies controlled by the hard right.

In Iowa, a Midwestern state that will weigh heavily in the 2024 Republican primaries, a conservative prosecutor last week suspended reimbursement for morning-after pills for victims of sexual assault.

And in South Carolina, the State of Nancy Mace, a dozen Republicans defend a text providing that women having recourse to abortion can be sentenced to death.