Many Republicans support abortion. Are they switching parties because of it?

GOP leadership has floundered on the issue, and members have conflicting answers on party loyalty

Carter Sherman
Sat 13 Jan 2024

The first time Carol Whitmore ever had sex, she got pregnant.

It was 1973, and Whitmore was a teenager. Whitmore’s parents were in and out of trouble with the police, Whitmore said. When they told Whitmore they would help her raise the child, she thought, nope.

Instead, Whitmore got an abortion. That same year, the US supreme court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/13/abortion-republican-voters-presidential-election

USA – Clinics offering abortions face a rise in threats, violence and legal battles

April 7, 2023
By Aaron Bolton

Thirty years ago, Blue Mountain Clinic Director Willa Craig stood in front of the sagging roof and broken windows of an abortion clinic that an arsonist had burned down early that morning in Missoula, Montana.

"This morning, Missoula, Montana, learned that there is no place in America that is safe from hateful, misguided groups," she told the crowd of reporters and onlookers.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/07/1168547810/clinics-offering-abortions-face-a-rise-in-threats-violence-and-legal-battles

How the Supreme Court recalibrated the abortion debate in just 3 words

By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN
Sun July 17, 2022

It's not just that US Supreme Court majorities upheld Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban and overturned Roe v. Wade. The opinion also skewed the crux of the conversation going forward -- with just three words.

"Unborn human being" is the term Associate Justice Samuel Alito adopted from the Mississippi statute, thereby replacing the key phrase in the landmark 1973 Roe ruling that spelled out a constitutional right to abortion: "potential life."

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/17/us/abortion-religion-dobbs-roe/index.html

Why the Republican offensive on abortion is escalating

Ronald Brownstein
Tue April 19, 2022

(CNN) When three red states finalized severe restrictions on abortion over consecutive days last week, they highlighted the GOP's rising militancy on the issue -- and the political and legal calculations underpinning it.

Separate actions last week in Oklahoma, Florida and Kentucky made clear the red state drive to retrench, or eliminate, access to abortion is escalating as the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority nears a decision, expected in late June, in which it is widely anticipated to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/politics/abortion-laws-red-states-republicans/index.html

USA – The Supreme Court’s ‘Dead Hand’

The 6–3 majority-conservative Supreme Court is dangerously out of step with a demographically and culturally changing America.

By Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic
FEBRUARY 11, 2022

The supreme court has set itself on a collision course with the forces of change in an inexorably diversifying America.

The six Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices have been nominated and confirmed by GOP presidents and senators representing the voters least exposed, and often most hostile, to the demographic and cultural changes remaking 21st-century American life. Now the GOP Court majority is moving at an accelerating pace to impose that coalition’s preferences on issues such as abortion, voting rights, and affirmative action.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/02/supreme-court-conservative-rulings/622050/

USA – A culture war with real consequences is coming

Ronald Brownstein
Tue May 25, 2021

(CNN) One of the original culture war conflicts may be poised for a resurgence -- with potentially explosive political consequences.

The Supreme Court's recent decision to consider the legality of Mississippi's restrictive law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy could trigger the most serious and sustained political debate over the procedure since the final decades of the 20th century. And that could dramatically widen the already gaping demographic and geographic fissures between red and blue America.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/25/politics/abortion-mississippi-supreme-court-culture-war/index.html

The New Abortion Rights Advocates Are on TikTok

Gen Z activists have been unapologetic and confrontational, a shift in tactics for a movement at a crossroads.

By Jessica Grose
Dec. 10, 2020

In a TikTok filmed in August outside of a women’s health center in Charlotte, N.C., the uncensored version of the mid-1990s novelty rap song “Short, Short Man,” by Gillette blares: “Eenie weenie teenie weenie shriveled little short, short man.”

The camera is focused on a middle-aged white man in sunglasses, who is holding a poster depicting what appears to be a fetus with the word “abortion” printed on it. The caption on the video reads, “don’t worry, the volume was turned all the way up so he could hear :-)”

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/style/abortion-rights-activists-tiktok.html

USA – Here’s how most people actually feel about abortion, according to a national survey

Here’s how most people actually feel about abortion, according to a national survey

Karen Fratti
April 24, 2018

The controversy surrounding abortion rights often makes it seem like the country is seriously split right down the middle about whether or not women should have the right to choose to terminate their own pregnancies. The issue is emotional and controversial for anti-choicers, but a new survey delved into how people really feel about abortion, and it turns out that attitudes are shifting about legal abortion, especially among young people.

Although this hasn’t always been the case, the new survey, conducted by Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, shows that the more people are educated about abortion, the more they believe that women should have the right to do what they want or need for their bodies and lives. Respondents to the survey between the ages of 18 and 29 years old were more likely to have changed their views on abortion in recent years in favor of abortion rights. In that same group, 25 percent of the survey respondents said that they had become more supportive of a woman’s right to choose, while only 9 percent had become less supportive.

Continued: https://hellogiggles.com/news/heres-how-most-people-actually-feel-about-abortion-according-to-a-national-survey/