A Vanishing Breed: Republicans in the Statehouse Who Support Abortion

Republican Toni Boucher was a steadfast supporter of legalized abortion during her two decades in the Connecticut legislature.

“This is an issue that’s important to me as a woman,’’ said Boucher, who is on the ballot again this year, trying to regain the state Senate seat she lost to a Democrat in 2018. “It’s been important to me for over 20 years.”

In Boucher’s view, access to abortion is consistent with a core principle of conservatism: Government should not meddle in people’s private lives.  

She is part of a vanishing breed. Once common in state Capitols around the nation, Republicans who publicly back legalized abortion have become political unicorns. 

In recent years, the Republican party has fortified its opposition to abortion, leaving little room for those who support abortion rights. And now, with a draft opinion suggesting the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, red-state legislatures have ramped up efforts to pass laws sharply restricting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, with some, such as Texas and Oklahoma, essentially approving de-facto bans.

That wasn’t always the case. Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a champion of the modern conservative movement, supported reproductive rights. Prescott Bush, the New England blueblood who served in the U.S. Senate in the 1950s and is the father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents, was an early and active supporter of Planned Parenthood. He also served as the group’s treasurer.

"The arc of the Republican Party has changed,'' said Susan Cullman, a longtime abortion-rights advocate who was active in the Republican Majority for Choice, a now-defunct advocacy group. "There used to be quite a few Republicans who considered themselves pro-choice. … Today, that’s an oxymoron."

The shift began in the mid-1970s, with the rise of the Christian right. The Republican Party adopted an anti-abortion stance as part of its platform. “Republicans found a new means to expand their base and that was religious voters,’’ said Donald T. Critchlow, a professor at Arizona State University who is a scholar of conservative movements.

A decade later, Ronald Reagan told participants at a March for Life rally that America was founded on the principle that all human life is sacred. 

“We're told about a woman's right to control her own body,’’ Reagan said. “But doesn't the unborn child have a higher right, and that is to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?”  

No One in the Middle

In the polarized, post-Trump political climate, there’s little room for Republicans who support abortion at any level of government. Just two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, openly back legalized abortion, though both voted against a Democratic abortion rights bill last month. (Collins said she is working on a bipartisan measure to codify Roe v. Wade.)

In statehouses, Republicans who support abortion are even more elusive, especially in red states. Sarah Davis, a self-described “rowdy moderate,” was the only Republican in the Texas legislature to buck her party on abortion, as well as LGBTQ civil rights. She lost her bid for reelection in 2020. 

“The ideological center of elected Republicans has moved drastically to the right even just in the last four to six years,’’ said Christina Polizzi, spokeswoman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “You have the Trump influence on the party and also Republicans gerrymandering legislative districts in a lot of states. As a result, the more ‘moderate Republicans’ have been unable to hold on to their seats and Republican state legislatures are a lot more right wing and a lot more extreme then they might have been a decade ago.’’

Sue Liebel, director of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said opponents of abortion at the state level have been bracing for the rejection of Roe for years. 

“States have been preparing for this ever since Trump was elected and [appointed] new members of the Supreme Court, who obviously trended in favor of life,’’ Liebel said. “That has emboldened the conservative states in anticipation that someday Roe might be overturned.”

The court’s decision to take on a case that challenges Roe v. Wade “happened a lot sooner than anyone expected,’’ she added.

In many places, Democrats, too, have been reluctant to veer from their party orthodoxy on abortion. Support for preserving Roe v. Wade has become a litmus test for Democratic candidates.

“There’s a polarization of state politics that makes it very difficult for anyone trying to run as a moderate and work with the other side,’’ Critchlow said.

Liebel said Democrats, under the ideological sway of progressives such as U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have shown zero tolerance for members of their party who express opposition, or even ambivalence, regarding legalized abortion.

“The extreme wing of the Democratic Party has put a wet blanket on Democrats who are pro-life or maybe they are pro-abortion but they want some limits,’’ she said. “From the standpoint of having the respect of their colleagues … and have disagreements within their caucus, Republicans are still a little more able to do that.”

As legislators in Republican-led states seek to enact increasingly severe restrictions on abortion, Republican women have occasionally spoken out. 

Two years ago, every female member of the Utah Senate—two Republicans and four Democrats—walked out of the chamber to protest a bill that sought to require women to undergo an ultrasound and be presented with a video recording on their fetus before undergoing an abortion. The Republicans who joined the protest identify as pro-life, but said the measure went too far. (The controversial bill ultimately died before a final vote.)

In addition to increased polarization, Cullman, the former member of the Republican Majority for Choice, blamed the erosion of abortion rights on several strategic blunders made by advocates for legalized abortion. "It's easy to see in hindsight that there was much more emphasis at the top of the ticket and not enough attention paid to what was going on in statehouses,'' she said. "The right has done an incredibly good job of organizing.''

The Republican Majority for Choice disbanded a few years ago, and Cullman left the Republican Party. "People weren't paying attention as these restrictions were passing,'' she said. "Everybody was sort of complacent." 

Crossing Party Lines

Connecticut is one of the few places where abortion politics don’t break neatly along party lines. Just days before Politico obtained the Supreme Court’s draft ruling effectively repealing Roe v. Wade, the legislature passed a sweeping measure that expands access to abortion and strengthens legal protections for women who undergo the procedure. 

Four Republicans in the Connecticut Senate and seven in the House of Representatives–including the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, Rep. Laura Devlin–voted in favor of the measure. A total of 17 Democrats voted no.

Boucher, the former Republican state senator from Connecticut, said Republicans who seek to restrict abortion are out of step with public opinion. Two-thirds of Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, according to an NBC News poll released last month. 

“Nationally, you have a couple of individuals who are in a position of influence who tend to be very pro-life and they have these strongly held beliefs and they are in a position to push the issue,’’ Boucher said. “Personally, I think they are swimming against the tide.”

Several years ago, Boucher and other Republican women in the legislature invited a top Republican National Committee official to Connecticut to discuss the issue. Having anti-abortion language as part of the party platform was “disturbing and disappointing,’’ Boucher said. 

“We gathered a whole slew of Republican women, there might have been 15 to 20 of us,’’ Boucher recalled. “We brought that issue to her hoping that they would change their tack. We didn’t want to be labeled or painted with that broader brush.”

The official “listened very respectfully but she had her own deeply held belief,’’ Boucher said. The platform didn’t change.