GOP shocked by abortion backlash and now risks 'tearing itself apart': columnist

The backlash to the end of abortion rights helped fuel Democratic wins in last year's election cycle, and Republicans are freaking out about the 2024 contest, according to a new report.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that guaranteed reproductive rights for nearly a half-century, and suddenly Republicans found themselves defending deeply unpopular abortion bans that many of them support -- but few other Americans do, wrote New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg.

"It’s not surprising that voters have reacted with revulsion to being stripped of rights they’d long taken for granted, and to seeing the health of pregnant women treated so cavalierly," Goldberg wrote. "But the backlash seems to have caught Republicans off guard."

Many Republicans assumed voters wouldn't care about the end of abortion rights, or even turn against those who were outraged by the decision, but that hasn't been the case.

Republicans have made the criminalization of abortion a defining issue in their party for decades, so they have no obvious way out of their political predicament.

"A decisive majority of Americans — 64 percent, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute survey — believe that abortion should be legal in most cases," Goldberg wrote.

"A decisive majority of Republicans — 63 percent, according to the same survey — believe that it should not. When abortion bans were merely theoretical, anti-abortion passion was often a boon to Republicans, powering the grass-roots organizing of the religious right. Now that the end of Roe has awakened a previously complacent pro-choice majority, anti-abortion passion has become a liability, but the Republican Party can’t jettison it without tearing itself apart."

"Republicans’ political problem is twofold," she added. "Their supporters take the party’s position on abortion seriously, and now, post-Roe, so does everyone else."