As a national politics reporter, I have long watched activists lobby Republicans to ban abortion, and lawmakers—eager to earn support at the ballot box—repeatedly affirm the GOP’s unflinching solidarity with the pro-life movement.
So, when the U.S. Supreme Court finally overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the landmark case guaranteeing access to the medical procedure, I suspected the fallout would be incredibly messy—not just for women navigating the patchwork of laws restricting abortion access around the country, but also for Republicans forced to grapple with wide-ranging viewpoints within their party on how, or if, the medical procedure should be regulated.
That dysfunction is readily on display right now in Arizona, where the Republican-controlled legislature sent Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs legislation that would repeal a Civil War-era abortion ban. Just weeks after the state supreme court revived the 1864 law, Democrats and a handful of Republicans backed a bill that would repeal the ban, which makes no exception for incest or rape, and imprisons doctors for performing the procedure, unless they are trying to save the life of the mother. (This law, by the way, was in place nearly five decades before Arizona became a state, in part thanks to a male lawmaker with a penchant for marrying girls.)
The conundrum in Arizona quickly earned national attention as Democrats seized on the court ruling, highlighting that Republicans were giddy to defend the near-total abortion ban, and warning that more efforts to restrict women’s reproductive health care would persist unless the GOP loses in Washington and down the ballot in November. This reality, coupled with different opinions among liberals and conservatives about abortion more generally, underscores the landscape Republicans are trying to navigate in 2024.
“Republicans in Arizona and across the country are in a really difficult position right now, because they know from polling that the majority of their constituents do not support an abortion ban,” Samara Klar, a political scientist at the University of Arizona School of Government and Public Policy, tells Vogue. If Republicans hope to expand their power in Washington and state legislatures like Arizona’s, they obviously need that support. But the GOP doesn’t have a silver bullet to address the abortion issue, which has quickly emerged as an central one for voters on both sides of the debate. Nearly 80% of Arizonians polled describe abortion as a somewhat or very important issue, according to a March survey from Klar and YouGov.