In election, support for abortion rights was about much more
WASHINGTON — To Mona Cohen, a lifelong Philadelphia Democrat, democracy is under attack in the United States. In the midterm elections, she lists a woman’s right to abortion as one of many fleeting freedoms she voted to defend.
Cohen, 68, feared the Supreme Court’s decision in June to eliminate women’s constitutional protections for abortion was only the beginning of a broader erosion of rights. So she backed Democrats in her state of Pennsylvania, where the party flipped a U.S. Senate seat and won the contest for governor against a pair of Donald Trump loyalists.
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A government dominated by Republicans, Cohen said, “would have gone on to impede contraception, to impede marriage equality, to impede any kind of civil rights that we as a society have fought for in the past 50 years.”
Support for abortion rights did drive women to the polls in Tuesday’s elections. But for many, the issue took on higher meaning, part of an overarching concern about the future of democracy.
Women, especially Democratic women, were more likely than men to say the Roe v. Wade reversal was a top factor in their vote, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 94,000 voters in the midterm elections. More women also said the reversal made them angry, and said abortion had a major impact on their decision to turn out and which candidate they supported.
But the future of democracy was an even greater factor than Roe for women voters. In interviews with AP reporters, many women linked their concerns about abortion to fears for the country.
“I’m not glad that we had to have this abortion drama happen, but I’m glad that it brought a new conversation to the table about what democracy should be to our country,” said Pennsylvania resident Brianna McCullough, 20, a sophomore at Chatham University in Pittsburgh. “If they can take this away, they can take anything away from people. And I don’t think that’s right.”
Heading into this week’s election, Republicans were expected to seize control of Congress. That’s still a possibility, with several races too close to call, but Democrats denied Republicans the sweeping nationwide victory they had expected.
Many Democratic candidates advocated for abortion rights on the campaign trail. But they also cast their Republican rivals’ “extreme” attitudes on abortion as one example of a broader threat to the country’s democratic institutions, including its election systems.
