House GOP Finally Realizes Its Anti-Abortion Policies Might Be Politically Toxic

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : There will continue to be significant pressure on GOP leadership from the right to pursue anti-abortion policy, no matter the political consequences.
61% : But Democratic lawmakers are hardly confident that Republicans will back away from anti-abortion pushes, be they larger or more incremental.
59% : Even after the GOP’s abortion rollback cost Republicans dearly in the 2022 elections, the new GOP majority in the House moved forward with policies curtailing abortion access.
52% : And in Ohio, a clear majority voted to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution.
51% : Despite pushing anti-abortion bills heavily when they were in the House minority, Republicans under former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did little to act on the issue, even in a post-Dobbs landscape.
43% : Before Tuesday’s elections, Democrats were already prepared to pounce on even a whiff of fresh anti-abortion force in Johnson’s policy moves.
38% : But under Johnson, House Republicans have launched new efforts to advance anti-abortion policy through a subtler and more piecemeal approach: by attaching restrictions on government funding bills.
34% : On Wednesday, Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY) told reporters that House Republicans need to “take stock that post-Dobbs the American people want every level of government to more appropriately respect the difficult choices women have to make.”“We have to recognize that these are difficult choices and politicizing them is not helping,” said Molinaro, who represents a district President Joe Biden won in 2020.Any internal GOP soul-searching on abortion, however, will take place under the leadership of newly minted Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), a staunch religious conservative who has made the fight to ban abortion an essential component of his legal and political career.

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