Talking before boarding Air Force One the morning after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization draft decision leaked, President Joe Biden said the opinion “goes far beyond the concern of whether or not there is the right to choose.” He called it “a radical decision” that could influence “all the decisions you make in your private life, who you marry, whether or not you decide to conceive a child.”
Vice President Kamala Harris claimed further that “the rights of all Americans are at risk. If the right to privacy is weakened, every person could face a future in which the government can potentially interfere in the personal decisions you make about your life.”
Never keen to be outdone, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed the Supreme Court “isn’t just coming for abortion — they’re coming for the right to privacy Roe v. Wade rests on, which includes gay marriage and civil rights.”
It’s significant that all of these responses reveal top Democrats trying to change the subject from abortion to almost anything else — to marriage, privacy, civil rights, etc. That’s because voters don’t agree with Democrats’ views on abortion. Party leaders try to turn discussion of Roe to any subject other than the one it is actually about.
The Democrats simply will not be honest on this, which is why they pretend that the legislation they have been pushing, the Women’s Health Protection Act, simply codifies Roe.
It doesn’t. It goes much further. Roe did not legalize all abortions. It invented a trimester framework for analyzing the constitutionality of state abortion laws. States could not restrict abortion in any way for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, but they could restrict it from the 13th through the 28th week to protect the mother’s health, and they could restrict it in any way they wanted from the 29th week onward.
It was a shambolic ruling, but, read literally, it largely tracked public opinion. The Women’s Health Protection Act does not. It would legalize all abortions at any time for any reason — up to the very second of birth. That is far beyond Roe and far outside mainstream public opinion. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, only 19% of voters believed abortion should be legal in all circumstances.
So Democrats cover up what they are doing, pretending it’s about birth control or even, incredibly, interracial marriage. Voters are divided on abortion and have been since before Roe was decided in 1973. This is not true of interracial marriage or birth control. Gallup found that 94% of adults approved of interracial marriage. Contraception is so widely accepted that pollsters don’t bother to ask about it anymore.
For those genuinely worried about birth control, Justice Samuel Alito’s draft that would strike down Roe explains convincingly why it would present no threat. The abortions at issue in Dobbs and Roe deal with a distinct human life. The contraception at issue in Griswold v. Connecticut does not.
Democrats are trying to make the end of Roe about contraception bans and interracial marriage nullification, which no one wants to change, because they want to hide their fanatical extremism on abortion. Fortunately, voters aren’t buying it. Democrats are just as unpopular now as they were before the Dobbs draft leaked — perhaps a bit more. They are going to have to find another issue to save them from electoral disaster this November.
