A Republican congresswoman is warning her party to back off from attempts to restrict access and the right to abortion around the country, calling it a losing issue.
Nancy Mace of South Carolina made the comments on ABC’s This Week, warning that the GOP would “lose huge” in 2024 if they did not reverse course.
Her comments came two days after the US Supreme Court preserved access to the widely used abortion drug mifepristone while legal challenges against its government approval continue.
It also comes as a handful of anti-abortion groups have rallied behind legislation in the US Senate, introduced by her state’s senator, Lindsey Graham, that would ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks into the pregnancy.
The party is currently at a crossroads on the issue of abortion, with divided opinions over whether to pursue bans at the state level, through Congress, or not at all. The Graham bill, unveiled last year ahead of the 2022 elections, was widely panned by Republicans including Mr Graham’s caucus leader, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.
Mr Graham’s bill is far from the only GOP-led effort to restrict abortion in the wake of last year’s decision by the Supreme Court to toss out Roe v Wade. A number of states including Florida have recently passed or are implementing bans, while other saw defunct bans snap back into place with the fall of Roe.
But whether it’s a winning strategy for Republicans is an entirely different question. In swing states where abortion rights were the centre point of Democratic campaigns due to local conditions like Michigan, where a 1931 law banning abortion snapped back into place, Republicans performed poorly and in many cases lost narrow races to opponents who vowed to protect the practice as a right.
As a result, the GOP only narrowly took back the House of Representatives in 2022 and failed to make gains in the Senate, instead dropping one seat to their rivals.
Ms Mace often advocates for a moderate stance by her party on various social issues and told The Independent in January that she watched her own district go from “mildly pro-choice” to “vehemently pro-choice” in the wake of the Roe ruling.
“We're not going to win hearts and minds over by being a**holes to women. It's not gonna work that way,” she said at the time.
