How Abortion Rights Help Keep Treacherous Authoritarians at Bay

Democrats hope that an emphasis on abortion rights will serve as a stark contrast to the designs of the GOP to further restrict abortion rights, as well as former President Donald Trump’s refusal to say whether he’d sign a national abortion ban. Reproductive rights have proven to be a potent electoral force, and Democrats are—not unreasonably—particularly keen to see if they might bolster their hopes at the polls in November. As part of this strategy, Democratic candidates have switched their rhetoric, moving from “choice” to “rights” and the “freedom” of individuals to determine their own fate, mostly because it polls better.

But this messaging shift is also helping to bring real-world change. While the loss of a federal right to abortion under Dobbs was the primary driver behind citizens siding with abortion protections in seven state ballots, semantics matter. In this case, Democrats are underscoring an important idea: that abortion rights protect democracy.

Liberal democracies assume as their starting point that we live in ethically divided societies. This is why they don’t require unanimous consent to pass laws, nor anything close to it for constitutional amendments. Democracies also enshrine protections for individuals, in part because of our ethical pluralism and in part to protect individuals from capricious abuses of power.

Another precept, though implicit, of liberal democracies is that societies don’t legislate everything. If they did do such a thing, we all might be courting a jail sentence every time we stepped outside. Were we to take every ethical dispute and turn it into a law, it would land us all on the wrong side of some edicts. You might not violate a proposed law against having an abortion, but you could fall prey to the imaginary law against cheating on your spouse or lying.

More fundamentally, such a hypothetical world would be a boon for aspiring dictators. Those holding power would create laws to lock their political foes behind bars. A world where all ethical disagreements are put into law is a short-lived democracy. The challenge for liberal democracies is knowing which individual rights to protect and which ethical disagreements to keep outside the law so as not to self-detonate democracy.

With free speech and bodily autonomy, what needs to be protected by the law and what we desire ethically can conflict. When they do, the lodestar must be protecting democracy. For example, most of us want strong free speech protections so the government can’t jail us for dissent. Many of us also desire that when we debate ideas we do it civilly. The first consideration is enshrined in law, while the second is a moral stance on how to treat others. Yet if the state legally mandates the ethical belief that we should debate politely, it undermines the justification for legally protecting free speech. This is the very mistake that a wing of the Democratic Party is advocating for on campuses, while the extreme right is erroneously “protecting” citizens from ideas through banning books and restricting teachers’ speech.

In the same way, legalizing the ethical position that abortion ends a potential life undercuts an important reason why we provide individuals with bodily autonomy: Again, it’s an important safeguard for democracy. Just as we might want to talk about contentious political issues without yelling at family, tens of millions of Americans believe it is unethical to have an abortion. Yet no one must be dissuaded from their ethical values; we just have to get everyone to understand that democratic principles must at times take precedence.

The danger is that conservatives are not consistently applying their skeptical approach to handing more power than necessary to government. They may refuse to provide more robust economic protections or tighten gun regulations, but they are quick to accept stripping citizens’ power over their own bodily autonomy when it comes to abortion.

The conservative Supreme Court made this mistake by striking down Roe, arguing that it was promoting democracy to return power to citizens and states to legally decide “a question of profound moral and social importance.” It does not enhance democracy to devolve power for critical individual rights that make democracy possible, such as free speech, the vote, and bodily autonomy.

If control over one’s body is not a legally protected individual right, it erodes the security of all other rights. For example, individuals without financial means and community assistance who are denied an abortion will struggle to vote and engage civilly. Some conservatives get close to recognizing this concern with calls for greater public childcare assistance, but they do not address the dangers to democracy of saying only certain people have freedom over their bodies.

Reality is messy because so many actors can influence history. Germany has not slid into authoritarianism since its ban on denying that it previously slid into authoritarianism. Ireland was a robust democracy for decades while also criminalizing abortion, only recently legalizing it. No one can know how or when a democracy will fall, or how much it will be endangered just by outlawing abortion. But even if we don’t know the probability of something happening, it doesn’t mean we don’t know when we increase the odds of it occurring.

Anti-abortion activists should consider how the legalization of ethical disputes can imperil democracy. Is the increased risk to democracy worth saving additional lives? In times of war, we do not disregard the danger to our country in order to save the lives of all soldiers. We fight for freedom, not every potential soul. Many on the right believe in the motto “Live free or die,” yet have not confronted how abortion bans increase the possibility that we lose our liberty. If Republicans are willing to die to protect it, which is deeply honorable, they should at least understand that they are working against it when demanding abortion be a crime.

Some Republican voters who are ethically against abortion do recognize the necessity of legally protecting it. Recent votes to defend abortion access in places such as Nebraska make sense when put in this context. Politicians are beginning to realize that for the fate of their own careers and the success of their party, forcing a 10-year-old rape victim to flee your state to get an abortion turns the public against you.

Worryingly, anti-abortion politicians have responded by working against voters’ preferences. Republican politicians in Ohio attempted to change the voting threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a majority to 60 percent. Their aim was to prevent abortion rights advocates from enshrining a state constitutional protection for abortion. They failed. A later Ohio ballot measure that constitutionally protects the right to an abortion passed. Yet in the name of abortion restrictions, politicians were willing to effectively strip citizens of their voice on all future amendments.

Historically, abortion restrictions are correlated with authoritarian regimes. While the direction of causation likely runs both ways, the arc of history shows that the democracy movement works in parallel with the expanding freedom of bodily autonomy. This should not come as a surprise given the similarities to robust free speech protections, which are also strongly associated with democracies. Few democracies have stood the test of time in the way that the United States has; few, notably, have such strong First Amendment rights. Most European, Asian, African, and South American countries have had authoritarian regimes in the last century, while only roughly a dozen countries have been democracies for more than 90 years.

No dictator allows free speech. Permitting it is too slippery a slope to democracy. Similarly, no autocrat respects the bodily autonomy of those he rules over. Jailing dissidents is a necessary tool to retain power. The abortion rights movement must broadcast this until citizens understand what abortion bans are putting at stake: the future of a free people.