Nikki Haley is right about a federal abortion ban
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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For the half-century that Roe v. Wade reigned supreme, pro-life politicians could make a killing by campaigning on fantasies of abolishing the nearly 1 million abortions performed in the country per year while doing absolutely nothing in practice. Now that the movement got what it sorely wished for, in the form of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, Republicans are stuck between a rock and a hard place: What they spent 50 years promising versus what they can actually get done without decimating the party for a generation in the polls.
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley has emerged from the field of 2024 presidential hopefuls as one of the clearest-eyed on the abortion matter, willing to pour cold water on the pro-life fantasy that Republicans should pass a federal 15-week abortion ban — let alone that they could even do so.
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“I’m not going to lie to the American people,” Haley, also a former South Carolina governor, said on CBS over the weekend. “Nothing’s going to happen if we don’t get 60 votes in the Senate. We’re not even close to that on the Republican or the Democrat side. At the federal level, it’s not realistic. It’s not being honest with the American people.”
While conservatives ought to understand the logical conclusion of overturning Roe is that abortion is indeed a states’ rights matter, perhaps the pragmatic argument against even teasing a federal abortion ban would be more convincing. For that, we can turn to, again, Nikki Haley in her landmark abortion speech delivered last month.
“Nationally, however, the task is much harder,” Haley said of actionable pro-life restrictions. “As a practical matter, you only achieve consensus when you have a House majority, a 60-vote Senate majority, and a president who are all in alignment. We are nowhere close to reaching that point. Today, there are around 45 pro-life senators, depending on how you count them. There haven’t been 60 Republican senators since 1910. It could happen one day. But it hasn’t happened in over a hundred years, and it’s unlikely to happen soon. We have to face this reality. The pro-life laws that have passed in strongly Republican states will not be approved at the federal level.”
Haley’s courage to tell the truth came not without consequences. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America immediately blasted Haley’s position as “not acceptable,” reiterating that a 15-week federal ban is the organization’s line in the sand.
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But Haley isn’t just right that such a promise is not “honest.” In fact, accepting abortion as under the purview of the federal government opens up the much more likely possibility that Democrats, who last held 60 seats in the Senate just 13 years ago, simply codify Roe into federal law. Good luck waiting another century for Republicans to get a shot at starting from square one on abortion (again).