As Joe Biden prepares to take office following his apparent presidential win, anti-abortion groups are focusing the bulk of their efforts on securing Republican victories in the Georgia Senate runoff races.
The races, set to determine which party will control the Senate, will also be the deciding factor in whether the anti-abortion movement has significant legislative power through at least 2022. Without wins for both incumbents, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, advocates fear that they will lose the legislative and judicial gains they made through the combined efforts of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump.
“This is an all-in, must-win battle for Georgia,” said Mallory Quigley, national spokeswoman for the Susan B. Anthony List’s anti-abortion campaign in the state.
The group, the most influential anti-abortion voice in the Trump era, plans to reach about 1 million people and spend $4 million to keep Loeffler and Perdue in office. And, although the SBA List did not previously have ground teams in the state, it plans to build them quickly to cover as much ground as possible before the January runoffs. The group already has spent more than $52 million on Trump’s 2020 campaign, as well as other efforts to maintain Republican control of the Senate.
The SBA List plans to leave “no stone unturned” in its efforts, Quigley said, because it knows full well that a Biden-Harris administration has “no interest” in taking the anti-abortion movement seriously. That’s a message the group, along with other anti-abortion partisans of the president, have sent since last summer, when Biden, in part because of pressure from Kamala Harris, flipped on his long-held centrist stance on abortion to oppose the Hyde Amendment. The amendment, a legislative provision affirmed by the Senate, bars federal funding for most abortions.
Democratic control of the Senate could mean the end of the Hyde Amendment, a party goal since it gained control of the House in 2019. Democratic control would also, many anti-abortion activists fear, mean the end of other Trump-era gains: final say on judicial appointments, the end of the legislative filibuster, and the passage of the Equality Act, a hotly debated piece of gender identity legislation that includes abortion provisos.
“It could be game over permanently for a number of pro-life protections that we currently enjoy,” said Tom McClusky, president of March for Life Action, a group affiliated with the March for Life, which hosts the largest annual anti-abortion demonstration.
Like the SBA List, March for Life Action has dropped much of its national efforts to focus more heavily on the Georgia runoffs.
Both Perdue and Loeffler have anti-abortion bona fides, although neither have served a full term in office. Both supported a Georgia state legislative bill banning abortions after six weeks. Both signed on to the Republican-driven Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which requires that doctors care for survivors of botched abortions. And both voted to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was widely viewed among anti-abortion advocates as a possible vote against Roe v. Wade on the Supreme Court.
Even if they win, however, many anti-abortion policies touted as victories during the Trump administration might not remain in place. McClusky pointed particularly to centrist Senate Republicans such as Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who co-led a push to repeal the Mexico City Policy, a federal provision which bans overseas funding of abortion.
“There are still some pro-life provisions that are in jeopardy,” McClusky said, adding that a win in Georgia would only help abortion partisans hold the line against an incoming Biden administration.
Pro-abortion rights advocates have also sensed the importance of the Georgia races, with NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood raising the cry among abortion activists to turn out the vote for the Democratic challengers, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. The campaign is not new ground for Planned Parenthood, especially: The group in 2017 dumped more than $800,000 into an unsuccessful attempt to get Ossoff a House seat.
NARAL this year plans to use its ground team of more than 50,000 people to continue its fight against Loeffler into the runoffs. The group spent more than a million dollars in the race and is ready to spend more, said President Ilyse Hogue after Election Day.
“We must do everything we can to make sure anti-choice politicians know there is a political price to pay for throwing women and families under the bus,” she said in a statement.
