The return of anti-abortion politics to the national agenda in recent weeks has caught many by surprise. One wouldn’t think, after all, that “family values” would be the metier of the Republican Party of Donald Trump. But the alliance between conservative evangelicals and corporate oligarchs that has been so central to US politics for the last three decades has held solid, as shown by the passage of so-called “fetal heartbeat” bills in Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Ohio. The bills, which criminalize abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (before many women even know they are pregnant), effectively ban abortion while imposing truly draconian penalties.

The coordinated push for the bills, accompanied by Trump’s grotesque pantomimes about supposed post-natal infanticides, have caught many liberals off-guard. The New York Times portrayed this as a new stage in the abortion debate, where liberals are pushed on the defensive by the torrent of lies being spread by anti-abortion forces.

Yet what is most striking about these bills’ place in the abortion debate isn’t their popularity, but rather the opposite: public opinion polling reveals little support for restrictions of this nature. As Eric Levitz has argued, the “heartbeat” bills, along with much of Trumpism, are the product of a “tyranny of the minority,” in which the United States’ anti-democratic political institutions persistently deliver policies that are out of step with majority opinion. Along similar lines, Ari Berman has written that the bills are, in part, the bitter fruit of racial gerrymandering that has delivered disproportionate Republican majorities in many state legislatures.