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21-01-2024
WASHINGTON: On Friday, activists assembled in Washington for the March for Life, the nation’s largest annual anti-abortion rally.
The crowds were thinner than in past years, due in part to the cold temperatures and blowing snow that blanketed the capital overnight but the campaigners in attendance this year also acknowledged the more concerning headwinds facing their movement, now in an election year: a general public broadly supportive of abortion rights, and a Republican party increasingly hesitant to join the fight.
“It is kind of discouraging,” said Olivia Murphy, an activist from Virginia. “Keeping the momentum up is definitely challenging.”
Four years earlier, Donald Trump had become the first and only sitting president to attend the March for Life. “Unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House,” he said, pausing for applause.
Trump soon delivered on that promise, helping to reshape the Supreme Court into the body that would overturn Roe v Wade in June 2022, rescinding the nationwide right to abortion but in the 18 months since that generational victory in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, things have not gone quite as planned.
Instead, the anti-abortion movement has been stymied by mounting public support for reproductive rights, and a series of bruising electoral defeats. These challenges will soon collide with the presidential election, where abortion is expected to be a leading issue. Trump, the likely Republican nominee has begun his own retreat, calling for “compromise” from activists.
“We want people in office to truly be on our side. It’s a tough situation,” Murphy said but “we’ll work with what we have.”
Last year, at the first march after Roe’s demise, activists seemed triumphant.
In the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, Republican-controlled states moved swiftly to outlaw the procedure. Today, 21 states have either total or partial abortion bans on the books, with some including harsh punishments for doctors and others who assist in accessing the procedure, including jail time, steep fines, and the loss of medical licences but these anti-abortion policies incited fierce anger among broad sections of the American public, boosting support for reproductive rights. About 69% of voters think that abortion should be legal throughout the first three months of pregnancy, the period when most abortions occur, according to a recent Gallup poll. The survey marked a high watermark in support for pro-abortion activists and in the first year without Roe, the average number of monthly abortions rose, according to data released in October from a research group backed by the Society of Family Planning (SFP).
Abortion bans have caused serious harm to families across the country, said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University and an abortion expert but “the anti-abortion movement would sure hope that they were accomplishing something more than some disruption.”
“They thought they were to use their words ‘saving babies’ and, on balance, they’re not,” he said, citing the SFP data. (Int’l News Desk)
