At least seven states, and perhaps as many as eleven, will have referendums on their ballots this November to enshrine a right to abortion in their state constitutions. A friend I was e-mailing with the other day was incredulous over the fact that pro-life forces have already lost referendum after referendum after Dobbs, even in states with pro-life laws. “Don’t people understand that preborn babies are humans and so abortion is homicide?”
This got me to thinking, and here are my reasons why, unfortunately, pro-life advocates have lost past referendums and, in my opinion, are likely to lose many, if not all, of those to be put to the vote this coming November. One way to look at it is that all the vestiges of Roe v. Wade and a half-century of legalized abortion did not disappear as soon as the Supreme Court overruled Roe.
- People don’t want to face the fact that, in the U.S., we’ve killed a lot more people than the Nazis did. If it is true that abortion kills a baby, then we’ve killed a lot of babies since 1973, when the Supreme Court decided Roe. We’ve aborted at close to a one-million-per-year clip. We don’t like to think poorly of our country.
- Those who’ve had abortions by and large do not want to admit they did wrong. With abortions running at that clip, and by some counts holding steady or close to it after Dobbs through women shifting to pharmaceutical abortions; there are a lot of voting women who have had abortions. With notable exceptions, admitting that they are guilty of infanticide is not something they care to do.
- Most people know women who’ve had an abortion and don’t want to call them murderers. Maybe most voters haven’t had an abortion themselves, but an awful lot know someone who has, or suspect that they do. It’s judgmental and confrontational to say that those who’ve had abortions have killed their own child. It’s a lot easier to say, “I wouldn’t do it, but I don’t want to judge those who have.”
- Women want the convenience of doing away with an unwanted pregnancy. Surveys indicate that, by a good measure, unmarried women have the majority of abortions (83% by one count). For them, as well as for married women, abortion serves as a form of birth control when none was used or when it failed. They fudge the difference in preventing conception and killing the child after conception.
- Parents want the option of abortion if their daughter gets “in trouble.” Along these same lines, I’ve heard parents say that they are personally against abortion, but if their unmarried daughter gets pregnant, they want the option of her being able to abort. Single motherhood is not something they want for their child.
- People have believed the lie that they have a right to sex without consequences. At its base, Roe and its progeny indulged an assumption that people have a right to copulate without suffering the consequence of taking that action, even when everyone knows that the natural consequence of the sex act is conception. No right, properly understood, carries with it the right to avoid the natural consequences of exercising that right, but “sex without consequences” has great allure. They claim it as a right because they want it as a right.
- Some women believe abortion has been good for women in the workplace. This argument is mainly heard in academic circles, but there is no proof that there is a cause and effect between the availability of abortion and women’s workplace advancement and well-being. This back and forth was debated in the amicus briefs filed in the Dobbs case.
- Some women believe abortion equals out their status with men: because men don’t have to carry babies, women shouldn’t have to do so either. Nothing will erase the hard facts that women carry babies and men do not. The argument could be turned around to be that men to have equal status with women should be able to conceive and bear children. Neither status is preferable to the other; each has its advantages and disadvantages. We need both. If carried to its logical conclusion, women would become like men and refuse to carry babies and humanity would die out. However, some justify abortion on this ground and believe that a vote against abortion is a vote repressing women.
There are a lot of reasons people, even people who say they believe abortion is wrong and would never do it themselves, will refuse to vote to prohibit others from doing so. To defeat the upcoming pro-abortion referendums, pro-life forces are banking on “educating” people that abortion kills a child and is also bad for the women who do it. People already know the former and think the latter is the individual woman’s “right” to decide. Unfortunately, the trend in favor of the pro-abortion forces is not likely to change this coming November.
