Will The End of Roe v Wade Save the Democrats?

Taking away established rights tends to create a more intense backlash

In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage. At that time, gay couples were inured to the humiliating indignity and gross injustice of being denied legal nuptials. Instead, they settled for alternative accommodations, including weak domestic partnerships, promises and handshakes, or for the financially privileged, hiring lawyers to draft legal papers that sort of protected their rights.

Building on the momentum of Massachusetts, in 2004, then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed gay couples to wed at City Hall. The ceremonies led to nearly 4,000 marriage licenses awarded in a single month before additional marriages were ended by the state. The case then went before the California Supreme Court in 2008, where LGBTQ people won the Freedom to Marry. The glee didn’t last long, as anti-gay forces launched a bitter referendum, Proposition 8, which passed with 52-percent of the vote, overturning the court’s marriage ruling.

Since California’s founding in 1850, gay people had passively accepted that they were forbidden by law from marrying. However, in the aftermath of Prop 8, volcanic protests erupted, with LGBTQ activists fed up and no longer settling for second-class citizenship. It was one thing to have never experienced equality, and quite another to taste liberty, only to have it unceremoniously yanked away.  

Which brings me to the topic of this column: Abortion.

A woman’s right to control her own body and have reproductive choice has been the law of the land since 1973.That’s fifty long years where women have been in control of their own destinies, without Big Government mandating that they give birth once pregnant. That could change in June with the U.S. Supreme Court deciding a case that could spell the end of Roe v. Wade.

The political impact of such a controversial, earth-shattering decision is a wildcard in this election year. How will Americans react when a cabal of arguably illegitimate conservative justices engage in blatant judicial activism to overturn a court precedent? Like Proposition 8, millions of people would be experiencing a right that was revoked. The reaction might be swift, unpredictable and intense. Once voters grasp how much freedom is lost in the blink of an eye, there could be powerful political ramifications that might overwhelm the current Republican electoral advantage.

Given the current trajectory for the midterm elections, Democrats are in big trouble. A Gallup poll reports that 47 percent of Americans now identify with the Republican Party and 42 percent with the Democrats. Writer Christopher Caldwell explained the seriousness of these numbers in a New York Times op-ed:

“That sounds ho-hum: one party doing a tad better than the other. But the Gallup numbers may portend a political earthquake. Republicans seldom lead on measures of party identification, even when they are doing spectacularly well in other respects… Between 2016 and 2020 the Democratic advantage swelled to between five and six points. When Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump a year ago, Democrats held a 49-to-40 advantage. From nine points up to five points down in less than a year — it is one of the most drastic reversals of party fortune that Gallup has ever recorded.”

Given these dispiriting numbers, what could save the Democrats? Perhaps, it’s abortion, with a Gallup poll showing that 80-percent of the country believes abortion should be legal under any or certain circumstances. This issue is so tied to Party identification, that it would be nearly impossible for Republicans to create any daylight between a High Court ruling and the candidates they have running for office. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that an abortion ban would lead to the complete collapse of the Republican Party in crucial swing state suburbs.

Complicating Republican chances of winning Congress would be the epic celebrations by radical Christian conservative activists. Imbued with confidence and overcome by raw emotion, we can surely expect insane news interviews with quotes that look like they were lifted off a script from the Handmaid’s Tale.

We all remember the downfall of Todd “legitimate rape” Aiken of Missouri. Except this time the potential exists for multiple, misogynistic, Todd Aiken-types to come out of the woodwork. Given the GOP’s turn towards authoritarianism and extremism, does anyone expect Party officials to apologize for such crazy-eyed remarks in 2022?

We also live in an online age with cable television. Between June and Election Day, there could be mammoth protests, boycotts of states that ban abortion, corporations fleeing to more liberal states as their workforce rebels and the occasional back alley, coat hanger abortion on CNN – reposted a few million times on social media.

In a preview of what to expect, activists are now calling a boycott of Pepsi after a report discovered the corporation donated to Texas Republican lawmakers who supported the state's draconian abortion ban. Such donations might have been tolerated before, but they likely won’t be if Roe is overturned.  

The other possibility is that the Supreme Court guts Roe and after a few days of underachieving protests, the country goes on with business as usual. Maybe voters are placated by abortion still being offered in Blue States. Perhaps, liberals are burned out after four years of Trump’s insanity, BLM protests, voter suppression measures, living with COVID, higher inflation and rising crime (and whatever happens with Russia, Iran, North Korea and a reemerging ISIS). It could be that progressives are just too exhausted to look for their pink pussy hats in the garage, and instead opt to smoke weed, drink wine and watch Netflix.

I’m placing my bets, however, on all hell breaking loose if Roe v. Wade is eliminated or downsized to the point of irrelevancy. With gay marriage I’ve seen what happens when rights that people enjoy are stripped away by a right-wing fundamentalist minority. Unlike gay marriage, reproductive choice impacts far more people and will have a significantly greater political fallout. An overconfident Republican Party might find that by winning in court this Summer, their dreams of winning back Congress are swiftly aborted.