Abortion Isn’t About Feminism
5 min read
One of the greater indignities of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision—besides stripping millions of American women of their bodily autonomy—was how deeply out of step it was with the majority of Americans’ beliefs. According to a 2023 Gallup poll, a record-high 69 percent of Americans believed that first-trimester abortions should be legal. Considering this statistic, it’s surprising that Democrats haven’t more robustly rallied people around this issue. One reason may be that they just don’t know how.
Roe gave American women decades of false comfort: Abortion access and reproductive rights could remain firmly in the dominion of feminist causes. Keep Your Hands Off My Reproductive Rights T-shirts became nearly as ubiquitous as Girl Boss tote bags. But although most Americans support abortion access, feminism remains more polarizing. Only 19 percent of women strongly identify as feminists. That number is far higher among young women, but among young men, the word has a different resonance: Feminism has been explicitly cited as a factor driving them rightward. Democrats might not like how this sounds, but what they need to do now is reframe a winning issue in nonfeminist terms.
One way is to talk about abortions as lifesaving health care, which more women have been doing. Another model is to talk about it not as a women’s issue, but as a family issue. This is the strategy of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice. For 15 years, NLIRJ has worked in states such as Florida, Texas, and Arizona, training community leaders it calls poderosas to speak with their neighbors. The conversations don’t necessarily begin with abortion at all.
Most Hispanics in the United States are Catholic. Despite a deeply ingrained religious taboo against abortion, 62 percent now believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That number has risen 14 percentage points since 2007. This remarkable change is partly a reaction to draconian abortion restrictions in several Latino-heavy states. But much credit should also be attributed to years of grassroots work by organizations like NLIRJ to shift the culture.
“We ask them what keeps them up at night,” Lupe Rodríguez, the group’s executive director, told me. Rodríguez holds a degree in neurobiology from Harvard and was a scientist before she shifted into reproductive-justice work. That opening question might yield answers about problems at home or a lack of functioning electricity in their neighborhood. The point, Rodríguez said, is to go past individual “rights” and to connect “reproductive autonomy and bodily autonomy to the conditions that people live in, right? Like whether or not they’re able to feed their kids, whether or not they have money to pay the rent—like everyday concerns.” In this way, reproductive rights go beyond a niche women’s issue to something that affects every aspect of a community.
None of NLIRJ’s materials uses the term feminist. Rodríguez said this wasn’t a conscious decision, but she stands by it. “Our approach is a lot about certainly freedom, certainly bodily autonomy, certainly folks being able to make the best choices for themselves and their families. But it’s very connected to community and family.”
Poderosas are trained on how to discuss faith and abortion, and voting and abortion. Crucially, they are not required to personally hold pro-abortion views. The organization is nonpartisan. Involvement has no ideological requirement other than believing that everyone should be entitled to make decisions that are appropriate for themselves and their family. “We’re bringing people in that way, by not casting them aside” if they don’t share the same perspectives, Rodríguez told me.
This has proved an effective strategy for Latino advocates across the country, and one that Democrats can learn from. In Florida, NLIRJ and other organizations, such as the Women’s Equality Center, have shifted the narrative around abortion bans to be about the government interfering in private family matters. In Arizona, a recent poll by LUCHA, a family-oriented social-justice organization there, found that 75 percent of Latino voters agreed that abortion should be legal, regardless of their personal views on the matter. In New Mexico, male Hispanic Democratic politicians are campaigning on reproductive rights even in conversations with Latino male voters, whose primary concern is typically the economy. Representative Gabriel Vasquez is banking on this being a matter of family and personal liberty—exactly what drove so many Latino immigrants to America in the first place. “It is not about whether we are pro-choice or pro-life,” he recently told The New York Times. “It is about trusting the people that we love to make those decisions for themselves.”
Latinos have played large roles in getting abortion-rights measures on the ballot in Florida and Arizona this fall. And although just 12 percent of the general electorate considers abortion access a leading issue, according to a 2022 national survey, that number was 19 percent among Latinos.
So often, political analysts look at how Latinos vote without asking why. It’s as if they assume that Latinos’ rationales are too foreign to understand. Democrats should not make that mistake now. This pragmatic approach is appealing to Latinos because they are largely politically moderate, working- and middle-class people concerned about their family, and about kitchen-table issues—just like much of the population in swing states. The Republican Party seems to have caught on to this; Democrats can’t afford to miss it.
No self-identified feminist who deserves the title will be supporting the intergenerational-bro ticket of Trump-Vance in 2024. The Democratic Party doesn’t need to pander to those voters, or pass a rhetorical purity test on women’s rights to galvanize them; they’re voting Democratic no matter what. Democrats need to focus on all the other voters—who may not care about feminism but do care about their families’ health and ability to thrive—and reframe abortion as an issue that affects everyone.
