Well, things were already changing before Dobbs, but basically there were a couple different ways. The larger antiabortion groups that had gained power over the years had various metrics for measuring how loyal Republican candidates were to the movement, which they would then use to motivate voters: candidate ratings, voter guides, and the like. And what they would tell Republicans was not that there were necessarily that many antiabortion voters, but that antiabortion voters were more committed.

So the story that I think a lot of Republicans believed for a long time was not that most voters were opposed to abortion — because they knew that wasn’t true — but that the voters who were opposed to abortion cared more. The average Democratic or independent voter might feel a certain way about abortion, but abortion was not a top issue for them, almost ever. Whereas for people opposed to abortion, that might be the only thing they would think about when they went to the polls. There was this image of the single-issue voter.

The other thing that was happening, although this is more complicated, was on the donor side. And the reason this was more complicated is because pro–abortion rights organizations like Planned Parenthood always outraised and outspent equivalent organizations within the antiabortion movement. But there were still single-issue donors on the Right who expected politicians to do specific things about abortion, and catering to them could be important. For example, the guy who founded Domino’s Pizza, Tom Monaghan, was one of these people.

And then finally, as the country became more gerrymandered and more polarized, there were a lot of areas of the country where it was good politics to be extreme on abortion. So not all of this was just skullduggery; some of it was just genuine polarization. You began to see a divergence between the influence of the antiabortion movement within certain state legislatures and in some safe House districts versus the party as a whole. In those places, positions that might have been damaging to the party as a whole would be advantageous to state legislators, gubernatorial candidates, and members of the House (not really senators so much). Those trends all increased starting in the 2000s.

Yes — and sometimes push further than those organizations.

Because one of the things that was happening at the same time was that the antiabortion movement itself was becoming divided.

The larger groups that I mentioned were essentially the antiabortion establishment. They were no less extreme in terms of what they wanted to have happen, but they were savvier. Their attitude was, we need to do things that are realistic. They were more pragmatic in the sense that they wanted to win as much as they could in the short term. So they were willing to accept less than absolutely perfect policies in the interim.

But there were lots of other groups with different strategy ideas. And part of what was happening was that politicians became more willing to go even further than the larger establishment groups were advising. And sometimes even to lift up more extreme voices in the movement.

So there are the more old-school establishment groups like the National Right to Life Committee and Americans United for Life. Some of them are actually becoming more extreme — or rather, they’re proposing more extreme ideas; substantively, everybody in the movement is more or less on the same page. But these are basically single-issue groups. They don’t talk about gay rights for most part; they’re just antiabortion groups.

Then you have what you might call multi-issue Christian right groups, which were more ascendant starting in the ’90s. They combined advocacy on other issues — usually their big issues were anti-LGBTQ stuff and religious freedom, broadly defined — with antiabortion stuff. For example, the Alliance Defending Freedom or the American Center for Law and Justice, which was Jay Sekulow’s group.

Then you have groups that have been in the ascendant more recently. These tend to be younger groups that are more extreme, like Students for Life [of America]. And I think they’re now making a bid to be the new dominant force.

Students for Life had antecedents in earlier years, like Collegians for Life, but it was restarted with money from an angel investor in the mid-2000s. More recently it formed a PAC and now it’s really a powerhouse in both state legislatures and on the Hill. And it’s more overtly extreme on some issues. Like, it’s opposed to the pill, which it says is an abortifacient.

Like the birth control pill.

Yep. I mean, you can go on their website, they’re not hiding it.

No, that’s not what they’re trying to argue — they’re trying to argue that it’s abortion. I mean, clearly there’s a history of that within Catholicism. But nowadays the opposition to birth control within the movement is broader than that and about more than that.

And then, finally, there are bottom-up state-level groups. So if you think of SB 8 in Texas — the “Bounty Bill” — those were not people from a national group. They were local activists. But then they started to say, we can come up with a strategy that everyone will want to imitate. So you start to see some of that happening now, too, where state groups are proposing strategies that diverge from the national movement and then seeing if those catch on nationally.

Yes, it did. Trump was obviously an interesting figure for the movement. Because on the one hand, they didn’t trust him in the beginning. But on the other hand, as you know, Trump was very unpopular. So as a result, he was more beholden to socially conservative voters than a lot of the politicians who had come before him.

For example, someone like George W. Bush might have said the right things. And in fact he was actually a devout evangelical who had personally had a born-again experience and in some ways had the perfect biography for people in the antiabortion movement.

But he was also the last Republican to actually win the popular vote. So Bush at various points basically said, I don’t want to use my political capital on something that’s unpopular — and I don’t have to. He thought he had enough support without the most extreme elements of the antiabortion movement, so he could just not do what they wanted a certain amount of the time. He would do antiabortion things he thought were popular — like, he signed bans on specific late-term abortion procedures, for example. But when it came to things that were more unpopular, he just didn’t use his political capital. And the same thing happened with Ronald Reagan, by the way.

Trump didn’t have that luxury. If Trump didn’t have socially conservative voters, he literally didn’t have anybody. So Trump did more for the movement because he was more beholden to the movement. He would go to the March for Life; he would pick judges who were much more reliably antiabortion. He would prioritize antiabortion issues.

And I think that kind of crystallized something for some people in the movement that they had actually known for a while, which was that they didn’t necessarily want a perfect candidate. They wanted power. They wanted someone they could boss around. So the fact that nobody liked Trump made him much better from their standpoint.

And so, following that, there’s again been some internal debate going into 2024 about what they want now. Is Trump still the way to go because he delivered for them in the past? Or maybe not, because the party has been rebuilt around Trump in ways that maybe make him less dependent on social conservatives. I don’t get a feeling from the people I’ve talked to that they know what the way forward in 2024 ought to be — which isn’t surprising because there are strategic fights going on about what the way forward ought to be for the movement, period.

Well it’s still in flux. I don’t think anyone knows how powerful Trump is going to be going forward, which means that the partnership between Trump and those conservative Christians isn’t as solid as it used to be. And, relatedly, I don’t think those groups know whether they can trust Trump anymore, which means they don’t know how much to rely on him. I don’t think Trump knows whether relying on those groups is smart politics anymore. So we don’t know how much he’s going to lean on them. And within the antiabortion movement itself, they’re fragmented about what to do going forward.

So it’s hard to generalize. I think the role of the antiabortion movement in the GOP vis-à-vis other factions is contested. And you can see this just from the randomness right now of how antiabortion groups or politicians in the GOP are reacting to the abortion issue. You have people on the one hand saying, we need to stop talking about this issue. Then you have Ron DeSantis signing a six-week bill — you don’t know what they’re doing. And I think a major reason for that is that there’s a feeling that antiabortion base conservatives are still going to be huge in primaries, but the issue may be more of a liability in general elections.

There’s also a lot more nuance now because now states actually can legislate on abortion. Before Roe fell, there were a lot of politicians who felt they could talk a big game about what they would do if they could ban abortion, but they didn’t actually have to do anything. But now that they can do it, there are a lot of divisions from state to state in terms of what Republicans are willing to do, because it’s just much more of a liability to take strong antiabortion stands in purple states than it is in others. Plus there’s a divergence between Republicans at the state and federal levels.

Yes and no. On the one hand, a lot of the savvier players knew that that’s what Republican politicians were doing. I mean, a lot of these people are pretty smart about strategy. So I don’t think it’s a huge surprise to them that politicians were bullshitting them because they knew that that’s just what politicians do.

I think what was more of a surprise to them was that they had been making the argument for a long time that the reason voters weren’t backing abortion bans was just because they couldn’t — because Roe v. Wade had made it impossible. And at first, I think that was just an argument they were making. But then they began to believe their own rhetoric — that if Roe were gone, American voters would come to see that abortion was wrong and would get on board. And I think they’ve been surprised by how untrue that has proved to be and are not sure what to make of it.

But I think a lot of them have pivoted pretty quickly to saying, you know, we don’t really care about what voters want, which wasn’t that hard of a transition because the movement has been sort of set up that way for a while. In its own understanding, it’s a human rights movement. It sees what it’s doing as more important than majority rule.

Yes. Because if you said, “Hey, you know, what you’re doing is antidemocratic,” they, first of all, might not agree with that, but they would say, “Even if you’re right, so what? We’re stopping the Holocaust. And if the Holocaust were popular, would you be okay with it? No, you wouldn’t. So why should we be.”

I think there’s a combination. Some people genuinely think Americans just don’t get it. That they don’t know what abortion is and they’ve had the wool pulled over their eyes by the abortion lobby or the abortion industry or whatever. And then there are others who are sort of like, look, we don’t really care. We’re not here to talk about that. We’re focused on doing what we can to stop abortion and we don’t really care if voters don’t like it.

They’re mostly strategic. There’s been a pretty broad consensus within the movement that the end goal is some form of constitutional fetal personhood. That would be available either through a US Supreme Court decision declaring a fetus to be a person or through a constitutional amendment. Now, obviously, there’s not going to be a constitutional amendment. That’s just not going to happen. So it would have to be a US Supreme Court decision, but there doesn’t appear to be any chance that’s going to happen in the near term.

So the divide is really not about what the end goal is. The divide is more about what’s a good idea in the short term, how far to push, and what matters and what doesn’t. Then there are disagreements about specific strategies. Like, do you rely on the the Comstock Act? Do you try to prevent travel? These are all strategies for getting to a national ban, whether that means interpreting existing law in a certain way or preventing travel from states that allow abortion or doing various things to prevent access to the abortion pill. They’re debating which of those strategies would work the best. And then there are questions about whether to punish women, which is another fault line.

Yes, definitely. In fact, today [April 17] there’s going to be a press conference about some lawsuits that are going to argue that the Comstock Act already bans all abortion nationwide. There’s a lawsuit trying to cut off all access to mifepristone nationwide, and the Supreme Court is going to have to decide by Wednesday how many of these lower court orders to block. Idaho has passed the first of what are likely to be several laws trying to limit interstate travel for minors for abortion. So that’s very much happening.

I mean, who knows? We don’t know, which is what it makes it complicated.

We haven’t seen proposals to do that yet. I think that will come, but I think there was a perception by a lot of Republicans that it was a bad idea to do that this time because it would be unpopular.

Yes, we don’t know if it would be unconstitutional. There isn’t a lot of precedent for trying to do that. And it would probably depend on exactly what a state was trying to do.

The interesting question would be, say, someone from Alabama comes to California and the California doctor performs an abortion. Can Alabama prosecute the doctor? Or what if the doctor from California mails abortion pills to someone in Alabama who then takes the pills in Alabama. Can Alabama prosecute them for that? And the answer is basically, we don’t know and/or it depends. It’s pretty clear there are some constitutional protections for some of those actors, but maybe not for all. And it’s legally contested enough that there’s a lot of gray area.

But at the moment we don’t have any statutes that directly raise the question, other than maybe Idaho’s. And there’s been no challenge to that yet. So, it seems inevitable that we’re going to find out sooner or later, but not immediately, because there are no cases that have currently been brought.

Eventually, yes, but you don’t see it right now. I think for now the Republican Party feels it can’t win without the antiabortion movement. But I don’t know if they think they can win with the antiabortion movement either. They’re in a very difficult position and we don’t know yet how they’re going to sort all of that out really.

We’re seeing more on the Comstock Act. Just today, Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer who wrote SB 8 — the Bounty Bill — filed a lawsuit essentially arguing that New Mexico’s protections for reproductive rights are illegal because they contradict the Comstock Act. The act, among other things, says it’s a federal crime to mail abortion drugs and paraphernalia. And there’s a big, complicated history about what it actually means and how courts have interpreted it.

You could see a ban on all abortion, depending on how the Supreme Court interprets it.

It’s hard to know because it’s a counterfactual — what would have happened had you not had Roe? Certainly it was a lot easier to talk about how much better things would have been without Roe when there was Roe and you didn’t have all these efforts to criminalize abortion at the national level.

Now we’re in a world where this is all going to be down to what voters think and who’s able to mobilize better. But the danger we’re seeing now that hadn’t been exposed before is that winning in popular politics only works if your democracy is functioning properly. If it’s not, and you have a lot of decisions being made by legislators who aren’t representing what people want, or by federal courts, or even by voters who are not prioritizing what they think about an issue, then you’re going to get distortions emerging through democratic politics, too.

So, as much as I think it’s been promising so far in terms of how voters are actually thinking about these issues, it’s also exposed these dangers that people hadn’t been thinking about when they talked about achieving abortion rights through popular politics.