Republicans are showing their hand on abortion

Just in time for the midterms, Lindsey Graham has made himself and his colleagues look very hypocritical indeed, says Holly Baxter

Republican senator Lindsey Graham was met with protests on Tuesday (AFP via Getty)

Everybody knows – or at least suspects – how Republicans feel about abortion rights. Though they talk about “loving them both” (a common right-wing phrase about supposedly embracing both the pregnant women and the foetus at the same time) and about small government, most liberals and progressives know that those who oppose abortion usually do so because they want to control women’s bodies. At its core, it is a hardline evangelical belief based on conservative gender roles – which makes it somewhat ironic that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said “we’re not going to be like Iran” when he talked about restricting abortion limits. (In Graham’s telling, Iran is an abortion-on-demand state replete with terminations. Anyone with a passing knowledge of geopolitics knows this isn’t true.)

But most Republicans didn’t expect the outcry when Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court. Though the party has been leaning further and further right over the past decade, everyday Americans have not – even if a handful of them are radical. Most Americans support some form of access to abortion. And when the very Republican state of Kansas had a vote on whether to ban abortion in the state, many members of the GOP were surprised. Kansans roundly rejected the proposal, pointing to a distaste at the idea of abortion restrictions among the core Republican electorate. Many Americans, after all, vote Republican not because they believe in evangelical or right-wing ideological policies, but because they are essentially libertarian. Restricting a person’s right to do what they want with their body just doesn’t chime with those kinds of voters.

Some Republican hardliners, however, have not been dissuaded. Graham this week announced he was planning to introduce a bill to Congress which would ban abortion nationally after 15 weeks except in cases of rape, incest or imminent danger to the mother’s life. The fallout was immediate. Protests exploded across the country. Republicans themselves couldn’t distance themselves fast enough; even Trump sycophant Mitch McConnell said that he and most of his party members preferred it remained a case of “states deciding”.