The right to abortion in the US has shaped the public debate in the country in 2022 in the midst of the legislative election, especially after the Supreme Court decision that ended five decades of legal support from federal instances to women who opted for the procedure.
Now, after the midterms —midterm elections—, US party politics is reorganizing itself for the presidential election, and the issue is already emerging as one of the central topics for 2024.
Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who is tipped as one of the top contenders for the presidency two years from now, said he was “looking forward to signing great pro-life legislation.”
Asked about the possibility of a “heartbeat law”, as laws in other states are called that prohibit abortion when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which usually occurs around the sixth week of pregnancy, DeSantis said: ” It’s something I always said I would do.”
Other Republicans have also spoken out, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, who said in an interview at the end of November that “one of the greatest legacies” of his tenure as Donald Trump’s vice president was “restoring the sanctity of life at the heart of legislation”.
On the other hand, President Joe Biden repeats as much as he can the goal of turning the right to abortion into federal law and has signed a series of decrees in recent months on the margins of what he can do as president, such as protecting women who travel to have the procedure and prohibit them from suffering discrimination at work or studies.
Despite the division between Democrats and Republicans at the top, the discussion turned out to be more complex than imagined, and the issue of abortion did not prove to be just a dispute between left and right.
When, on June 24, the Supreme Court stayed the Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that understood that abortion was a guaranteed right in the American Constitution, the expectation was that the decision would be the password for anti-abortion movements and state Legislatures to implement increasingly restrictive policies.
What was seen, however, was the opposite. The defense of the right to terminate pregnancy politically organized women even in more conservative states, and the clearest message came in the midterms, the legislative elections that took place in November and renewed the Chamber and part of the Senate.
At first, opinion polls pointed out that uncontrolled inflation in the country would punish Joe Biden’s Democratic Party and would give a majority in the Legislature to the Republican Party.
After the court decision, however, Democratic candidates gained traction even in more conservative regions in the interior of the country, with women registering to vote (suffrage is not mandatory in the US) and rejecting anti-abortion candidates. The result was that the Democrats not only maintained but increased their majority in the Senate, contrary to predictions. In the Chamber, they lost, but by a much narrower margin than originally anticipated.
Anthropologist Debora Diniz, a professor at the University of Brasilia and a researcher on reproductive rights, says that “the issue of abortion goes beyond the traditional boundaries we understand about parties and agendas.”
“The history of the Republican Party in the USA until the 1970s and 1980s was not one of restricting the criminalization of abortion. This is something very recent”, he says. “The issue of abortion is built in a supra-party way”, he summarizes, citing the opposite example in Brazil, where “parties more what we would call the left have moral or conservative conceptions in terms of abortion”.
This apparent inconsistency in the issue of the agenda is seen more clearly in state legislatures and courts, true battlegrounds for the issue of abortion in the US, since the possibility of approving national legislation on the subject today is small.
In Michigan — governed by a Democrat but whose local legislature is controlled by Republicans — voters managed to pass an amendment to the state Constitution protecting the right to abortion. In more Republican Kansas and Kentucky, voters rejected amendments that said there were no abortion rights in the state.
Even so, the situation is far from being resolved, and today nearly 35 million women of reproductive age live in states where abortion is totally or partially prohibited, according to government data.
The Supreme Court decision also encouraged changes in other areas, and there was a movement to enact customary guidelines that were guaranteed by court order.
In November, the US Congress approved the recognition of same-sex marriage, which until then was guaranteed only by the highest court.
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