Abortion-rights victories cement 2024 playbook while opponents scramble for new strategy
“Looking at the results in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, it is pretty clear that abortion matters to voters because it matters to people in their everyday lives,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice president of communications and research of Reproductive Freedom for All, an abortion rights lobbying group formerly called NARAL Pro-Choice America. “And I think when you look down the road to 2024, and you see places like Florida, that gives you a sense of what’s possible. Even where you have hostile legislatures and gerrymandering and all of the structural inequalities stacked against you, you can still make big change when you get the power back to voters.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, 21 states have eliminated or restricted access because of abortion bans. And as States Newsroom has reported, even with health exceptions and especially without them, women have been denied medical care during pregnancy-related emergencies.
“[Voters] understand that life is not these one-size-fits all bans,” Vasquez-Giroux said. “They don’t account for how complex pregnancy and life are. People understand that you can’t legislate a belief system onto a medical procedure and expect that nothing bad is going to happen.”