It is finally time to reiterate that Kamala Harris was wrong to assume that abortion rights was the prime issue for all women — the one plank that would rally 50 per cent of the population behind her. Harris, the celebrities who endorsed her, and the strategists of the Democratic Party in the US, seem to have forgotten that there is more to a woman’s life than her reproductive rights. She also works, she is also affected by crime, she wants a stronger economy, and so on.
But the Washington DC-Los Angeles hothouses forgot all that and decided that abortion was the ‘Brahmastra’ that would demolish the Republicans. Harris kept highlighting the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision — putting abortion legislation back in the states’ jurisdiction, overturning the tenuous federal Roe V Wade judgement — as a ‘ban’. Did she and her campaign managers think women don’t — think, that is? After all, it was clearly not an absolute ban.
Moreover, once the abortion ball was back in the states’ court in 2022, nearly one-third of their legislatures voted on varying degrees of restrictions on abortion. These were not passed by executive orders from governors but put to vote. Which means elected representatives of those states had their say and the decisions on abortion rights were democratically passed — not via judicial activism. And the views of women voters of those states were also certainly elicited.
Yet, Harris made abortion rights the focal point of much of her campaign and kept criticising “Trump abortion bans” at her election meetings. In fact, while accepting her party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention Harris pledged that she would sign into law a federal legislation restoring the right to abortion if it was passed by Congress. That will now not happen any time soon, of course, as the Republicans have a majority in both Houses.
India has remarkably liberal abortion provisions, under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act passed way back in 1971 and amended in 2021. It allows abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy for some categories, including rape. For abortions up to 20 weeks, an abortion service provider’s opinion is required. Women can also seek abortion on the grounds of contraceptive failure. Plus, public health insurance funds cover the cost of abortion services.
But it has never been or become a hot button election issue in India unlike in the US, which mystifies many Indians. The difference is that abortion in India has been codified as a health issue rather than a political — rights — issue, necessitated by health reasons, rape or foetal abnormality. In the US, it became a feminist issue and the then-liberal US Supreme Court defined abortion as a procedure to be sought by women for their own reasons, making it contentious.
Nevertheless, inasmuch as opinion polls can be trusted these days — less and less with each election in most nations — evidence from many of them in 2024 suggests most Americans, including 66 per cent women across all ages on an average, support abortion rights though they differ on extent and circumstances. Then why did Harris’s concerted doomsaying on abortion rights not get her a windfall fear vote, especially the female one? There was some miscalculation.
Trump did not get only male votes; the millions of women who voted for him are not all pro-life either. The inescapable conclusion is that women are concerned about other issues too, not just those related to sexual rights. It seems that the Democrats miscalculated how important abortion was when taken in conjunction with other imperatives. Migration affects women too, as do rising prices, climate change, war and taxes. Why presume one issue would sway women?
The day before the elections, most ‘liberal’ news outlets put out the narrative that Harris had a ‘double digit advantage’ among “over-65” women voters who were “breaking for her by a two-to-one margin”. The now spectacularly discredited Ann Selzer writing for the Des Moines Register, even used that factoid to project that Harris would beat Trump in Iowa, which he won in 2016 and 2020. And what happened? Trump has won Iowa again — with an even bigger margin.
Elsewhere, another pollster before election day said Harris showed a clear lead with women, and that among undecided voters Trump’s agenda on women’s rights was the main gripe. But the results say otherwise. Trump was perceptive enough to realise women were concerned about more than abortion. Addressing women, he had pointed out that voting meant economic catastrophe. “We’ll end up in a Depression, and you’re not going to be safe.” It worked.
Harris and her team were being condescending and sexist by deciding that women, especially those in the suburbs, were impacted more by abortion than the state of the economy. It was similar to the mistake they made by imagining the urban youth would be dazzled into voting en masse for Harris by the celebrity endorsements as if she was a make-up or fashion brand. Trump, on the other hand, did not presume that women voters had a single major agenda.
Cost of living and the economy were found to be the major concerns in almost all opinion polls for the past year, with Trump leading on who handles those better as well as immigration and border controls. Yet the Harris campaign presumed that women would “break” on abortion as she had a 20 point on that issue and decided to focus on that more. Amid the post-defeat finger-pointing at the softest target (Joe Biden) by the Harris camp, this should also be considered.
Democrats now have four years to figure out how much abortion will galvanise women voters in future. Already some Democrat commentators are denouncing white women voters for not supporting Harris in key states despite her strong push for their reproductive rights, but that party would be better off examining whether it is time to stop adhering to stereotypes of what “modern” American women are really concerned about, regardless of gender and race.
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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