MATTEO: Hello. This is Mateo (ph). I’m watching the sunrise from the summit of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States. This podcast was recorded at…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
1:05 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, December 17, 2024.
MATTEO: Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will hopefully be down the mountain after five days in the backcountry. Here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Wow. Congratulations.
MCCAMMON: Sounds beautiful. Get home safe. Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: And Elissa Nadworny is with us. She covers reproductive rights for NPR. Welcome back, Elissa.
ELISSA NADWORNY, BYLINE: Happy to be here.
MCCAMMON: On today’s show, we’re talking about reproductive rights, what happened in 2024, and what could be coming in 2025. Elissa, I want to start with President-elect Donald Trump. One of the things we’ve reported on a lot this year was his mixed messages on abortion. Remind us what has he said he wants to do?
NADWORNY: Well, I mean, I think a lot of people in the abortion space are kind of looking at what Trump did last presidency and kind of less about what he’s actually said he’s going to do in this next one.
MCCAMMON: Yeah. And, you know, Mara, on the campaign trail, Trump, he said he wants to leave abortion to the states, but he also bragged about being the person who got Roe v. Wade overturned by appointing those conservative Supreme Court justices. He also, in his first administration, enacted policies that reduced funding for reproductive health care for groups like Planned Parenthood who perform abortions. What can we learn so far from Trump’s cabinet nominations for his second term about how he might handle abortion this time?
LIASSON: Well, I actually think that his cabinet is much less important than him because everything in a Trump administration is very Trump-centric. But yes, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Health and Human Services nominee, supports abortion rights. But I think that the policy on abortion will be coming from the president himself. And the political trick for anybody dealing with a difficult issue is to convince two groups holding diametrically opposite views that you’re with both of them. And Trump has actually accomplished that by, as you said, boasting about appointing the conservative Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe, but he’s also spent the entire campaign saying it’s now up to the states. He wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban. And you don’t have anything to worry about – all of the changes on abortion have basically been completed. If that will hold, we don’t know.
MCCAMMON: It seems like such a strange and interesting time for the antiabortion rights movement. On the one hand, in the last few years, they’ve seen these enormous victories – the overturning of Roe v. Wade. At the same time, I mean, Elissa, the number of abortions in the U.S. is actually higher, right?
NADWORNY: That’s right. Since Dobbs – since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of abortions has grown, and that’s mostly due to the rise of telehealth. So you can now access doctors on the internet, over text message, to get abortion pills sent to your home. I think the rise in the number of abortions has really made antiabortion groups kind of stand up and put together plans and roadmaps for President Trump on kind of, like, what to do next. You know, this fight isn’t over. Like, Dobbs wasn’t the end for the antiabortion movement.
LIASSON: Well, Elissa, how much of the rise in abortion is not just telehealth and mailing things through the mail but the prevalence of chemical abortions or medical abortions overall? In other words, abortions are more and more performed by taking a pill or a set of pills than they are with some kind of a procedure in a doctor’s office, is that correct?
NADWORNY: So, yeah, the majority of abortions happen through medication. But I would say that the rise from Dobbs is probably some in part due to the expansion of medication, but mostly just due to the way that you can get medication. I mean, the experts that I’ve talked to who are tracking this stuff say really telehealth is huge because that was expanded during the pandemic. That’s kind of how we’re seeing this number tick up, even with, you know, places like Florida where the number of abortions in state has gone way, way down.
MCCAMMON: I mean, this is a place where the new administration could take some action. Is it not, Elissa?
NADWORNY: Yes, absolutely, Sarah. I think this is really going to be kind of the next frontier for the antiabortion movement. This is where the administration could come in with kind of rolling back some of the FDA guidelines that expanded sending medication through the mail. But it’s also a place where states are starting to, like, pass telehealth bans or pass restrictions against the medication.
MCCAMMON: And, Elissa, remind us – I mean, there was that high-profile litigation that started in Texas that I know I covered. And I think you and some of our other colleagues have covered different pieces of it that worked its way to the Supreme Court. This was the antiabortion group that was trying to essentially reverse the approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. They didn’t succeed. But as you said, many of these groups still have their eye on this medication because it is such a dominant method for abortion in this country. What are some of the levers that the new administration could pull? What are some of the ways they could restrict access in theory?
NADWORNY: Well, the big one, of course, is through Health and Human Services and the FDA. The FDA could essentially roll back some of their expanded access to medication. The other way that they could do that is through something called the Comstock Act, which is an 1800s anti-obscenity law that essentially could stop the flow of things used in an abortions. That would include things like medication. That would include things like medical supplies for even a surgical abortion. The main thing that the administration can do is interpret kind of in current laws and current regulations on the books. The Biden administration basically chose not to enforce those laws, and a new Trump administration could change their stance.
MCCAMMON: And, Mara, I’m curious. It seems that President-elect Trump will have pressure from a variety of opposing directions on this issue. On the one hand, antiabortion activists are well aware that they have been crucial to both of his elections. At the same time, he seems to be well aware that this is not a popular issue for Republicans at this point after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
LIASSON: No, not at all. As a matter of fact, he’s blamed the antiabortion movement for losses in the midterms. He considered it a big political headache. And that’s why he sent the message to the antiabortion forces – stand down. Stop advocating publicly for a national ban. He had to go so far as to say he wouldn’t sign one if it came to his desk. So I think that they’re going to have to step aside. Trump controls the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel. They can focus their attentions on the states. But I can’t imagine that some kind of a federal law or regulation that would, in effect, ban abortion will be able to happen during the Trump administration.
MCCAMMON: It’s time for a break. We’ll have more in just a moment.
And we’re back. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly, as we’ve said, tried to avoid the abortion issue by stressing that he would leave it to the states. And that is where a lot of regulation of abortion happens. You know, Republicans will control Congress, but likely not by a large enough margin to pass a national abortion ban – and as we’ve said, Trump has said he wouldn’t sign one. Elissa, voters in several states in the 2024 election did have a chance to weigh in directly on the abortion issue. There were multiple ballot measures on the subject this year. Remind us, if you could, just how did those turn out?
NADWORNY: Well, you know, most states that considered abortion rights amendments approved them. Seven either expanded or cemented abortion access into their state constitutions. It failed in three places. First was Florida – that was when a lot of folks were watching because they had to reach a 60% threshold in order to pass. They had a big majority – 57%, but not quite that 60%, and so that failed there. In South Dakota, which has a near-total abortion ban, their proposed amendment would have allowed abortions in the first trimester, about 12 weeks. And, you know, abortion rights groups said that it didn’t go far enough. They didn’t really fund it. It failed there.
And then in Nebraska, there was an initiative to essentially expand access up to viability, and that failed. Nebraska is kind of a little weird. There were two competing initiatives there. So voters actually did approve an amendment that prohibited abortion after the first trimester, and then the one that failed was the one that protected up to viability. So a little confusing for voters to have two.
MCCAMMON: But still, big picture, most of them passed, and that was a continuation really of the pattern we’d been seeing since the Dobbs decision. In one of the most interesting results of this election, on that note, I thought, was the gap between Vice President Kamala Harris’ performance in many of these states and the performance of the abortion rights measures. So, in other words, in a lot of cases, voters were voting for abortion rights while also voting for Trump. Mara, what does that suggest about how voters are thinking about all of these issues, you know, that they have to think about when they cast a ballot for the presidential election?
LIASSON: Well, they’re compartmentalizing them. The theory in the case of the Harris campaign was that these pro-choice referenda would bring out voters who would vote for Kamala Harris. Well, guess what? They – most of them won. Some of them won by curvature of the Earth. So they won almost everywhere and helped Kamala Harris almost nowhere. They just didn’t turn around and vote for her. They – Trump convinced them that they could – that voters, including many suburban women, could have it both ways – they could vote for him, and they could vote for abortion rights.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, and – but Democrats banked on this issue in a way that, as you said, it clearly didn’t pan out for them in the election.
LIASSON: No. The referenda won. They were right that these were popular initiatives, but it didn’t carry over. It didn’t bring out voters that otherwise would vote for Kamala Harris. They thought that all those suburban pro-choice women would come out and they would understand that Kamala Harris was the pro-choice candidate, but Trump convinced them that they could have it both ways. They could vote for him, and they didn’t have to worry about abortion rights being endangered because then they could turn around and vote for the referenda in their state.
MCCAMMON: I mean, we’ve talked about how this issue has shifted for Republicans – putting them on the defensive in many cases – but it seems like Democrats can’t bank on this the way that they have been. How might this shift the way that they navigate the politics around abortion going forward?
LIASSON: Well, they were right about one thing – that a majority of voters support abortion rights. And the thing they were wrong about was that getting voters out who support abortion rights would help their candidate. It just didn’t carry over to Kamala Harris. But they certainly are on the winning side of abortion rights. Almost everywhere it was on the ballot, it won. And I don’t think that they shift their stance on abortion rights at all going forward, but they have to figure out why it didn’t help her.
MCCAMMON: As we continue to talk about the states and the role the states play in this issue, what else will you be watching for as many states reconvene their legislative sessions in the new year?
NADWORNY: Well, one of the things I’m going to be watching is whether state lawmakers try and ask this question of abortion rights on the ballot again. So Missouri is a great example. I was just there. They passed a constitutional amendment expanding abortion access. You know, they’re still waiting to see if that’s going to actually translate to clinics. There’s several laws on the books there that include a near-total abortion ban, plus waiting periods and other restrictions. So they actually haven’t been able to even implement that amendment, in the sense that abortions aren’t really happening in the state until a judge says, hey, you can’t enforce those laws currently on the books. And Republican lawmakers I talk to there are actually already proposing a vote for next year. So they want to ask that question to voters again and see if they can get that amendment overturned. So I’m going to be watching that.
The other thing I’m going to be watching is how states are restricting things like travel. So Idaho, Tennessee, they passed laws prohibiting minors from crossing state lines to access abortion care. I’m going to be watching the Personhood Movement. You know, in Alabama, a judge there essentially said an embryo should be treated as a person, and that kind of really deregulated and kind of messed up IVF and had a big backlash in that state. So I’m going to be watching for specific things like that, Sarah.
LIASSON: Elissa, are we seeing what people were predicting when Roe was overturned, that you’re going to have two different Americas, you’re going to have states where abortion is effectively banned completely and states where it’s not?
NADWORNY: Absolutely. That’s what abortion access is like in America right now. It’s a patchwork. One state is near-total ban. Fifteen minutes across the state border has access up to 24 weeks.
MCCAMMON: We are going to leave it there for today. Elissa Nadworny, thanks for being here.
NADWORNY: You bet.
MCCAMMON: I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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