Wave or drop in the bucket? Why predictions of abortion driving votes are flopping

FORT WORTH, Texas — When the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision came down in June and overturned Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers everywhere rejoiced.

Their efforts over the last 50 years had finally borne fruit.

But along with the joy came trepidation.

It is an election year, after all, and our country is deeply divided on many issues, abortion among them.

Polling trends have shown that the percentage of people who self-identify as "pro-choice" and "pro-life" has varied over the years. Broadly speaking, though, the two camps have been divided almost evenly.

Still, it's no surprise that when a perceived "right" is limited, the number of people who claim to be in favor of that right dramatically increases.

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As expected, polling has showed an increase in support for abortion in the past several months. And the loudest and most active supporters of abortion have promised retribution at the polls.

"Supreme Court strikes out its own team ahead of 2022 elections," trumpeted one headline in The Hill last month, with the column predicting that Democrats will handily hold their congressional majorities.

Another piece in the American Prospect has suggested much the same.

The Texas Tribune reported that a handful of protesters gathered in downtown Fort Worth this month, carrying blue wave-shaped signs that read, "Sea you at the polls."

Two weeks out from the election, the "pro-abortion wave" is looking more like a soft lapping.

That's in no small part due to the fact that abortion as an animating issue has been eclipsed by other more pressing forces.

A University of Texas poll from late August showed that voters in the Lone Star State ranked abortion as the ninth-most important problem facing the country, after inflation, the economy, and even gun control — no surprise, given the skyrocketing cost of gas and groceries.

But abortion, interestingly, also trailed the rather amorphous issue of "moral decline."

Hmm.

Those numbers mirror national trends which also place abortion as an issue of concern well below worries over the economy, which loom large in the minds of voters in every state.

But abortion hasn't just trailed economic concerns because they are hitting voters' close to home.

A lot of dire predictions about the impact of the Dobbs decision aren't unfolding as its supporters predicted. In the weeks and months after Dobbs was issued, abortion supporters promised chaos, doom and death.

Without "safe and legal" abortion, women would be forced to turn to back-alley abortionists, they argued.

They would self-medicate to end their pregnancies.

And abortion supporters relentlessly repeated the false claim they have used for decades — that women would be dying in the streets by the dozens.

Four months after the landmark decision, there is a notable dearth of such horror stories.

Despite the efforts of some in the media to conflate medical care after miscarriage with abortion, there is little evidence that women's health is in danger because of Dobbs.

Abortion supporters even seemed to lose the narrative on the one disturbing tale that made national headlines – that of a young Ohio girl whose mother had to transport her out of state for an abortion.

The young girl had endured a sexual assault by a man who turned out to be in the country illegally.

The case sparked attention only because the abortion was difficult to obtain, but that was a double-edged sword.

Complexity and ambiguity in statutory rape reporting requirements have made it easy for abortion providers to use privacy rights to hide sexual assaults of young women.

So, quite ironically, had the abortion been easily accessed and routine, the rape may never have been reported and the rapist never charged.

That's a hard truth of the post-Dobbs world abortion proponents would prefer to ignore and perhaps part of the reason why their message isn't winning.

With two weeks to go, it's possible that the push to get more people to the polls on the issue of abortion will succeed by some measure.

But I expect the wave will flow the other direction.

We'll sea — pun intended.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Cynthia M. Allen
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
(TNS)

Cynthia M. Allen is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.