If Joe Biden wins a second term, his team says that his No. 1 priority will be restoring abortion rights across America.

“First of all: Roe,” as Biden’s deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks put it on NBC’s Meet the Press in early January. “It is unfathomable that women today wake up in a country with less rights than their ancestors had years ago,” he said.

Fulks is right: It is unfathomable, although pregnant women across red America have certainly spent the last year and a half fathoming it. Since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022 and ended the era of legal abortion nationwide, thousands upon thousands of women have had to flee their home states to end their pregnancies, or have ordered abortion pills online and taken them clandestinely. Many others have been forced into unwanted motherhood. Still others have nearly lost their lives after doctors would not—legally could not—provide them with the same level of care they would have received in more liberal states.

Americans overwhelmingly dislike this new “pro-life” normal, in which doctors are threatened with prison time if they help desperately ill patients, women may be criminally prosecuted for allegedly mishandling the aftermath of their miscarriages, conservative legislators try to force women into motherhood, child rape victims are refused abortions and turned into public spectacles, women with wanted but doomed pregnancies are told they must carry to term and birth a baby who will die in minutes, and pregnant women with serious complications have to turn septic or otherwise be on death’s door before they can have a legal termination. Indeed, only about 1 in 10 Americans—a small minority—agree with most major anti-abortion groups that abortion should always be illegal, which is roughly the same proportion who think that the Earth is flat.

And abortion has been winning at the ballot box, including in red states. Voters in Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, and California have been given the option to vote directly on the question of abortion rights, and all have voted in favor. These votes cross partisan lines: Many Republicans support abortion rights, or at least want the government to stay out of it. The anti-abortion movement seems so spooked by these outcomes that it is putting pressure on legislators in conservative states to get rid of citizen-led ballot initiatives entirely.

Even outside of direct votes, politicians who support abortion rights have been smoking anti-abortion ones. The pattern is so obvious that Republicans who were previously fire-and-brimstone abortion opponents are now curiously mum. Former President Donald Trump, whose appointment of far-right justices to the Supreme Court ushered in the demise of Roe v. Wade, has characteristically tried to play all sides, calling state restrictions “terrible” while also boasting that the “miracle” of overturning Roe was to his credit; he........

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