Republicans are getting increasingly desperate over the issue of abortion. On one hand, they cannot cross the religious right, their main source of energy and funding, from wealthy fundamentalists to everyday evangelical foot soldiers. But after the overturn of Roe v. Wade last year, the rigidly anti-abortion views of the GOP have become a major electoral liability, with close elections breaking blue as voters turn out to protect the right to terminate unwanted or unsafe pregnancies.
The GOP plans to nominate a widely hated chronic criminal for president in 2024, which already dampens their party's odds at the polls. The added headache of abortion is making the situation dire for Republicans indeed. Of course, the solution was never going to be dropping the religious right and going forward as a less fascist, more moderate party. (Which would also require dropping Donald Trump.) Instead, Republicans have latched onto the last resort for a losing agenda: Playing word games in hopes of tricking voters.
"Republicans are trying to find a new term for 'pro-life' to stave off more electoral losses," reads the headline last week from NBC News. GOP strategists presented polling data to Senate Republicans, the article explains, showing the term "pro-life" has become toxic to voters. But rather than accept that this reflects the larger public opposition to abortion bans, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., insisted voters don't "probably don't" know what "pro-life" means. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind. suggested a rebranding of "pro-baby," claiming he just wants "to demonstrate my concern for babies."
Obviously, there is nothing "pro-baby" about a party that consistently opposes funding for health care, food security, or education. Nor is there anything "pro-baby" about a party that rejects gun safety measures necessary to keep children from getting shot up in schools and grocery stores. But beyond that, really, is the sheer contempt for the voters that radiates off these comments. Hawley and Young really capture how Republicans think voters are stupid enough to be bamboozled with a little bit of linguistic hand-waving.
"Pro-life" is itself a euphemism, which tries to obscure the sadism at the heart of the forced childbirth movement.
Ironically, "pro-life" is itself a euphemism, which tries to obscure the sadism at the heart of the forced childbirth movement. Prior to the Dobbs decision that ended abortion rights, however, Republicans saw great success with the "pro-life" framing, often getting half or slightly more than half of Americans to identify with the term. But that's because, with Roe in place, "pro-life" functioned more as a moralizing term than a statement of policy preference. Lots of people who claimed to be "pro-life" meant something like, "abortion is okay for me, but not for some hypothetical woman I think has too much sex." Without Roe, however, people are forced more to worry about their own loss of access.
This contempt for voter intelligence is evident in the GOP embrace of the grossly dishonest term "abortion trafficking." At stake is the growing trend of women traveling out of state to get abortion care that's been banned in their own states. Pro-choice states that neighbor anti-choice states are seeing skyrocketing numbers of abortion patients, simply due to this abortion travel. A new report from the Guttmacher Institute shows that New Mexico had a 220% increase in the number of abortions, mostly due to women traveling in from Texas. Kansas, where voters protected abortion rights in a ballot referendum, more than doubled their abortion rate.
In response, Republicans are starting to argue that women do not have the right to travel freely. Last week, Alabama's Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, argued he can prosecute people for "criminal conspiracy" if they help women leave the state to get safe abortions. (The language unsubtly equates helping a woman terminate a pregnancy to Trump's actual criminal conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.) Republican attorneys general in 19 states are demanding access to women's medical records in other states, so they can harass women who traveled for abortion and those who help them. In Texas, GOP-controlled towns and counties are passing laws making it illegal for women to drive through them on the way to an abortion clinic out of state.
The embrace of a misleading and prudish term like "abortion trafficking" also illustrates why Republicans are having such trouble reskinning themselves as "moderate" or "compassionate" on the issue of abortion.
To justify this crackdown on the most basic right of free movement, Republicans are pretending to believe in something they call "abortion trafficking." The term doesn't just equate abortion with sex work. It feeds off this long-standing anti-choice myth that no woman really wants an abortion, and any woman getting one is necessarily being controlled by someone else. The term denies that women have autonomy, while also making a mockery of the real problem of human trafficking.
By pretending they're "helping" women escape "trafficking," of course, Republicans are actually cutting women off from necessary support. At a bare minimum, patients getting in-clinic abortions, like anyone getting similar procedures like colonoscopies, are required to have someone accompany them home. But patients need other help, from child care to emotional support. Republicans want to paint everyone who assists, from offering a ride home to simply holding a hand, as the equivalent of a pimp.
It also follows that the "trafficking" language is an unsubtle attempt to call every abortion patient a "whore." Regardless of how you view sex work (and I certainly believe it should be safe and legal), it's safe to say this rhetoric is an attempt to demonize. It's also likely to backfire since most voters are adult enough to understand that women have minds of their own and that not every woman is ready to have a baby at every moment in time. Indeed, even before Dobbs, polling shows most Americans — even many who supported restrictions on abortion — did not approve of shaming women who get abortions.
The embrace of a misleading and prudish term like "abortion trafficking" also illustrates why Republicans are having such trouble reskinning themselves as "moderate" or "compassionate" on the issue of abortion. They can switch terms all they like — why not go with "pro-crib" if "pro-baby" doesn't work out? — but these word games fail to understand why it is that abortion has become such an albatross for their party.
It's not just that Americans are unsettled by the steady drumbeat of stories of women being denied care for serious medical conditions because of draconian abortion bans, though that certainly doesn't help. It's that abortion has become a symbol for how the GOP is in the thrall of right-wing extremists. It's tied up with other issues, like book banning and anti-democracy organizing. No matter what words Republicans use, when they talk about abortion, they remind voters that they are an anti-democratic party trying to force all Americans to live under a strict set of religious rules that have no relationship to how most modern people live. No minor tweaks to language will distract from that reality.
