Abortion Is a State Issue Now

By: Charles C. W. Cooke, originally published November 7, 2024, National Review

Abortion is now an issue for the states. Is that a bold claim to make this early in the post-Roe world? Perhaps, but it certainly seems as if it’s shaken out that way practically. The Dobbs decision brought an end to the Supreme Court’s bad habit of setting a national standard based on nothing more than its own preferences, and the election of 2024 all but guaranteed that we will see no national legislation on the matter (legislation that I think is unconstitutional) until at least 2028. The winning candidate, Donald Trump, is against a federal ban; the candidate who was for national preemption, Kamala Harris, lost badly; and, while it seems as if Republicans will have control of both the Senate and the House, the party’s margins are small enough to protect the status quo. (Democrats ought to be grateful that the Republicans will not pick up their disgracefully short-sighted position, which was that the filibuster ought to be abolished to enable the passage of a federal abortion law.)

This does not mean that America is pro-life. It’s not. At the state level, pro-lifers are still losing most of the time. But that’s my point. Without intervention from the courts or from Congress, the matter is being resolved locally, albeit in ways I often dislike. By the time the 2028 election comes around, it seems probable that every state will have reached an accommodation that reflects the preferences of its voters, and that the salience of the issue in federal elections will thus have diminished even further. There are many reasons that Donald Trump managed to tie among voters who said that abortion ought to be “legal in most cases,” but I suspect that one of the key reasons was Trump’s insistence that the question was not within the remit of the office he sought. Knowing this, a huge number of pro-choice Americans felt comfortable voting for him. Going forward, I’d expect to see more of the same.

Charles C. W. Cooke is a senior editor at National Review and host of The Charles C. W. Cooke Podcast.