No. of Recommendations: 12
As for abortion, I don't like saying "never", but I doubt the Reps will be able to turn people on this issue. Almost certainly not within my lifetime. There is broad, majority, support for bodily autonomy (though some debate about where to draw "the line"). If Reps try to run on restrictive abortion rules, they'll lose.
There's no way to know for sure, but I think that socially conservative anti-abortion advocates genuinely didn't understand the scope of the medical health issues involved with pregnancy and abortion.
I've had discussions with conservatives about abortion IRL from time to time. They've generally been very suspicious of any "health of the mother" exceptions in abortion regulation. In nearly every conversation I've had on the topic, whoever I was talking to regarded that as pretextual. They were convinced that "health" really was just an effort by abortion rights folks to let any abortion happen, with the argument that any pregnancy is more dangerous to the woman than not being pregnant.
I don't think there was as much deep awareness of just how abortion regulation would mesh with how complicated and genuinely biologically messy pregnancy is.
Roe protected them from the difficulties of drafting regulations that could handle all the myriad scenarios. Now they've got their fingers caught in the blender. If restrictions are too tight, you get horror stories of women whose pregnancies have gone terribly wrong but can't get medical procedures necessary to save their fertility or force them into life-threatening situations. But if they're too loose, the base gets outraged when their thought leaders rail against the loose regulations.
