The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Amy Fried is a retired political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
Predictions for the next year and top 10 lists take up a lot of space in end of the year columns. And why not? People love to look back to take stock and also like to think they can figure out what’s to come. It’s a way of imposing order on a disordered world.
In reality, there’s a lot we just can’t know about 2024. We didn’t know in late 2019 that the COVID pandemic would cause millions of deaths along with myriad disruptions. In December 2011, a Gallup/USA Today poll found Mitt Romney leading President Barack Obama by 5 percentage points in a dozen swing states. That wasn’t predictive. Obama won 11 of those 12 and was reelected in 2012.
Yet there’s a prediction that’s easy to make. Although there will be a lot of issues affecting voters in 2024, abortion will continue to matter.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, reversing this half-century-old precedent, some pundits claimed the uproar would fade fairly quickly. It didn’t then and it didn’t in 2023, including in red states. In a landslide vote, Ohioans established a constitutional right to have an abortion. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a pro-choice Democrat running against a staunch opponent of legal abortion, was reelected after running ads featuring a woman who got pregnant at age 12 after being raped by her step-father.
Abortion hasn’t gone away as an issue in part because women who are sexually active and fertile monitor their fertility every month. That’s true whether they want to get pregnant or not. This isn’t an experience one forgets later in life.
And abortion hasn’t gone away because we’re seeing what overturning Roe has wrought. Take Texas, where the law bans abortions after six weeks, purportedly with medical exceptions. Yet when doctors discovered that Katie Cox, who wanted to be pregnant, was carrying a fetus with a severe abnormality that is invariably fatal after birth and which threatened her future fertility and life, the state didn’t allow her to have an abortion. Cox was able to afford to leave the state to have an abortion but not every woman can do so.
Moreover, states with very restrictive abortion laws also matter to Mainers.
For one, it highlights why it was necessary for Maine to broaden abortion protections this year by adopting LD 1619, An Act to Improve Maine’s Reproductive Privacy Laws. As we see from what happened to Katie Cox in Texas, having medical exceptions for abortion is insufficient to protect women’s health.
Also Mainers know and love women who live in and travel to states with restrictive abortion laws. Imagine having a pregnant daughter who has an emergency requiring an abortion but she’s in a state with very strict limitations. Her life and health could be in danger.
Mainers can judge their elected officials on their records on reproductive rights in 2024 and beyond. Maine’s senior senator, Susan Collins, said she thought Cox’s treatment was “terrible” and “inconceivable.” However, as Mainers well remember, Collins voted for Brett Kavanaugh to sit on the Supreme Court.
That vote was highly consequential. According to a recent report in the New York Times, “Four male justices, a minority of the court, chose to move ahead anyway, with Justice Kavanaugh providing the final vote.” Collins won’t be on the ballot again until 2026. In her last race, Roe was still in place when she won reelection with 51 percent of the vote.
In 2024, the presidential and congressional election will decide who else will sit on federal courts and likely whether the U.S. will adopt a national abortion ban. House Speaker Mike Johnson worked for the group that’s trying to ban abortion pills nationwide and co-sponsored a bill banning nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. The Supreme Court decided last week to review a case that limits the abortion drug mifepristone. President Joe Biden backs abortion rights and, after Roe was scuttled, issued executive orders to support travel rights, among other things. In contrast, this year Donald Trump bragged “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”
It’s easy to predict that Trump’s words will show up in a lot of campaign ads and that abortion will continue to matter in 2024.
