How Abortion Lost Its Cool
Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential election victory shocked many. The deplorables won the day, the elites were disgraced, and history was shown to have at least one more chapter. As Matthew Yglesias put it, “the vibes, they are a-shiftin’.” The vibe shift was especially evident among young voters, who swung hard to the right in 2024. According to Yglesias, “A big part of the ‘rightward’ shift in vibes is not the revivification of old conservative ideas but precisely the opposite.” Marginal groups have been centered so completely that the plight of the sexually nonconforming or promiscuous isn’t edgy anymore.
Liberal shibboleths are eroding. Concerning abortion, several data points from November bear this out. According to exit polls, women aged sixty-five and over were the only female age cohort to vote as loyally for Kamala Harris as they had for Joe Biden. Younger women shifted away from the Democratic candidate, sometimes splitting their tickets to vote for both Trump and state-level ballot initiatives that favored abortion access. Many of those ballot initiatives succeeded, continuing a trend that has held since Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the enshrinement of legal abortion in the Constitution. But a ballot initiative is a single-issue vote by definition. Thus, though it can hardly be said that young women are becoming pro-life, neither can it be said that they are single-issue pro-abortion voters when it comes to choosing their elected representatives. A generation gap may be emerging, with the gray lobby wondering why young women can no longer be relied on to rally to pro-abortion candidates.
With a record number of votes expected to be determined by abortion preferences, 2024 was supposed to be the “abortion election.” Political strategists reasoned that women—especially women under thirty, four in ten of whom said during the fall that abortion was their top priority—would secure the presidency for Harris.
The election results paint a different picture. In exit polls, only 13 percent of young voters named abortion as their top priority, down from 44 percent in 2022. Harris lost support from women overall, compared to Biden: Whereas Biden had won women by fifteen points (57 percent to Trump’s 42), Harris won them by eight (53 percent to 45). Only in one age group, the sixty-five-and-over set, did Harris improve on Biden’s performance, taking 54 percent. Meanwhile, Trump won 4 percent more of the overall female vote against Harris than he had against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
A surprising share of Trump’s female swing was delivered by eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds. Youth turnout was lower in 2024 than in 2020, and though the majority of under-thirty women voted Democratic, the gender gap between young men and young women shrank, with 7 percent more women favoring Trump than had done so four years before. Only women aged sixty-five and over were as motivated by abortion as pollsters had predicted, according to post-election analysis by the AARP.
Thus, the women who most reliably support the abortion industry and its candidates are those who least need its services. Well past their childbearing years, the sixty-five-and-over demographic has nothing personal at stake in the legality of abortion. Thus one pro-choice premise, that women vote in favor of abortion for pragmatic reasons, is not always true. The most reliable pro-abortion votes appear to be ideologically motivated, with women choosing Democratic candidates due to a belief that abortion access is a fundamental right.
The difference this can make to voting patterns is evident in the exit polls and has been elucidated by individual voters. Lauren, a young woman from Washington, D.C., who is pro-choice and voted for Trump, explained her defection from the Democrats to political journalist Mark Halperin in an election-day broadcast: “What is the rationale for basing your presidential vote on abortion?” she asked. “Is it just forcing yourself to believe that Trump is going to pass a national abortion ban? Or believing the fiction about Project 2025? It just feels so emotion-driven to me and uninformed, I just find it strange.”
Another young woman on the same broadcast, Megan from Santa Monica, California, said that she almost voted for Harris because of abortion, but finally was more motivated by resentment of the Democratic Party’s handling of its nomination process. “Everyone I know, mostly in my age group between twenty-six and thirty-three, seems to be voting for Trump,” Megan said, noting that her friends live in elite coastal cities.
Contrasted with these two women was longtime Democratic campaign strategist Jill Alper. An alumna of multiple Democratic presidential campaigns and a DNC delegate, Alper adduced recent voting history to predict that Harris would win young women overwhelmingly: “For decades, either race or someone’s position on reproductive freedom would be most predictive of their vote.” Indeed, Michigan in 2022 boasted the highest rate of voter registration among women, and the highest turnout among youth, as a result of abortion canvassing.
Alper also invoked the “granny gap,” the thesis that a silent majority of women sixty-five and over, who remembered a time before Roe and were appalled by Dobbs, would tip the scales for Harris. Quite literally, everyone and her mother was expected to vote in favor of abortion. What Alper did not appear to conceive of, however, was a gap that cut both ways. Younger women might be less ideological in their pro-choice voting than are their Boomer elders.
Older women remember, accurately or not, the bad old days when abortion was illegal and women resorted to coathangers and lye. One such woman is Naomi Jean Bernheim, eighty, who spent her fall planting Harris campaign signs on the side of highways and roads and was interviewed by CNN just before the election. “I’ve had people yell at me, ‘Why is an old lady worried about it?’ . . . To me, it’s not just a young woman thing, it’s every woman. I mean, what else will they take if they take this? What else is coming?” Bernheim said.
The Roe era encompasses a time when Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” coalesced a Democratic Party that was otherwise divided on the issue of abortion. By contrast, in 2019, when then-Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard used the phrase on the Democratic presidential debate stage, she met with a swift backlash. “Young feminists living in the age of dwindling access to abortion aren’t interested in a mantra that implies there is something shameful about the procedure, even if it has kept many people in the pro-choice tent,” one Atlantic writer said of the incident, demonstrating how completely pro-abortion had replaced pro-choice as the consensus position among Democrats.
Democratic voters’ views on abortion have changed dramatically in the last few decades. At the time Roe was decided, only 19 percent of Democrats said abortion should be legal under any circumstances. Thirty-one percent agreed in 1992, when Clinton coined his phrase. Today, 65 percent of Democrats say the same.
This change has come about through the work of the party’s radical wing, which has pushed the Overton window so far to the left that it has nowhere else to go. And yet the result of all this radicalism has been not more single-issue abortion supporters at the ballot box, but fewer. Precisely because of the zealotry that once gave them such an edge, the pro-abortion radicals are losing ground with younger voters.
By definition, a trendsetter is one whose opinion falls on the fringes of acceptable discourse. Favoring abortion access is exceedingly normal, to the point of being boring. A full 85 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal under at least some circumstances, according to Gallup. The same polls, when broken down, show that 35 percent of all voters, the largest cohort, said abortion should be legal in all circumstances. Though voters take varying positions on abortion access when asked about trimesters and weeks of pregnancy, the majority view is that abortion should be a matter of choice until somewhere between the twelfth week of pregnancy and the sixteenth. The question of a right to an abortion at some stage in pregnancy no longer seems to be up for debate, even outside the Democratic Party.
The consensus is especially strong among young female voters. Women aged eighteen to twenty-nine are “significantly likelier than older women to say abortion should be generally legal, and that it is morally acceptable,” the New York Times reported in 2022. But this clear win for the cause of abortion may come at the cost of political mobilization. The universality of the opinion may explain why young pro-choice women do not seem to find the political cause of reproductive rights urgent or inspiriting.
Women under the age of thirty have for years been told that Republicans are radically anti-choice and anti-woman, but reality never catches up to the hysteria. Horror stories, like that of Amber Nicole Thurman’s driving to another state to receive a botched abortion, are not only misleading but exceptions that prove the rule. Abortion activists needed two years of post-Roe trigger laws to scrounge up fewer than five women who had died horrific deaths after attempted abortions. And a closer look at these stories reveals the lethality not of abortion bans, but of negligent pill peddlers and media-driven medical mismanagement.
Meanwhile, demand for abortions is in decline, down by at least half a million per year since the peak of abortion incidence in 1990. (This trend may have begun to reverse itself in 2020, but since total abortion numbers have not been recorded since 2021, it is unclear whether the reversal was a true one or a statistical anomaly.) Perhaps one reason for the decline is that fewer women are getting pregnant in the first place. One in four American women today will never have a child. Those who do are having fewer children than they desire. Desires are complicated: It is possible to conceive of a woman getting an abortion even though she wants to have children, because she believes it is not the right time or not the right father. Still, when sexlessness is rising by every measure, it is not hard to understand why total abortion numbers are in retreat. For many women between eighteen and twenty-nine years old today, an unplanned pregnancy is not simply of minor concern; it is not even likely. The odds that such women will ever be desperate enough to turn to lye are basically nil. The decrease in desired abortions, combined with increased ease of access, means that most young pro-choice women will never bring to the issue the existential dedication of their elders.
Because of these changes, older pro-choice women have sometimes feared that young women will take access to abortion for granted. Xochitl Gonzalez, writing for The Atlantic in July, worried that “Roe gave American women decades of false comfort: Abortion access and reproductive rights could remain firmly in the dominion of feminist causes,” and therefore a sidebar to the bigger political issues of the day. She explained:
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.
As feminism becomes unfashionable in certain circles, Gonzalez fears that dedication to the cause of abortion access will go with it.
Feminism is becoming unfashionable in certain circles. If young pro-choice women are slipping rightward, they represent a mere fraction of the larger trend among young Americans, primarily male, over the last few years. The New York Times recently ran a piece titled “When Your Son Goes MAGA.” The Times quoted a therapist, Mike Rothschild, to suggest youth politics are often decided in opposition to their parents as another facet of youthful rebellion: “The stronger our parents feel about something, the more likely we are to be like, ‘Cool, now I know where you stand and I know exactly how far away to run.’” This explanation may be too simplistic, especially since young people were not the only cohort to move rightward in 2024. Still, whether they are rebelling against their parents or against the elite, a broader rightward movement of young male and female voters reinforces the notion that progressivism is uncool.
Trends have a way of obscuring the real debate. A full 96 percent of abortions occur before the fifteenth week of pregnancy. A child can feel pain by fifteen weeks; his heartbeat is detectable almost ten weeks before that. Though a generation gap among pro-choice women appears to be moderating abortion-driven voting, perhaps even opening the door to coalition-building between the political right and left, we must not imagine that the center of the debate is “moderate.”
Abortion access is not going anywhere. Even in red states where post-Roe trigger laws limit abortions, chemical abortion pills are about as easy to purchase online as a pair of sneakers, through pill mills that ship worldwide. The pills are largely unregulated, and attempts to change that have been rejected by courts, as last year in FDA v. Alliance, which sought to challenge FDA approval of mifepristone for chemical abortions. The idea of invoking the Comstock Act to restrict the mailing of abortifacient drugs is highly unpopular.
There was no pro-life candidate on the ballot in 2024. Declared support for abortion access through the first trimester or later was the official position of both major political parties and of every significant also-ran in 2024. Republicans in this election cycle were loudly in favor of allowing abortion until the fifteenth week of pregnancy, a major leftward move for the party’s messaging, if less so for its policy. The right presented this line in the sand as a via media, whereas the left called it “carefully, strategically, and callously planning for our deaths . . . literally.” In reality, a nationwide ban on abortions after the fifteenth week would have extraordinarily little effect.
This does not mean that a coalition of young pro-choice women, moving rightward in defiance of their party matriarchs, is politically irrelevant. Though it remains to be seen just how far the right is willing to push this coalition for the sake of oft-postponed pro-life victories, it is clear that the Trump administration is still willing to be seen as the pro-life party, if not the most anti-abortion one. Trump’s first days in office have disproved the contention of abortion abolitionists that there was no material difference between a vote for Trump and a vote for Harris. Since January, Trump has reinstated the Hyde Amendment, which makes it illegal to use federal dollars to fund abortions, and reinstated the Mexico City Policy, which prevents foreign organizations that receive U.S. aid from providing or funding abortions. And, though some young pro-choice women will always vote like their elders—ideology is more predictive of voting behavior than age—a political sea change may result in some strange bedfellows over the next four years.
If everything is permissible, everything is ordinary. The intention of the “Shout Your Abortion” movement was to make abortion stories commonplace, and by now the abortion-normalization lobby has worked itself out of a job. It is hard to say what will result. The voting behavior of pro-choice women under thirty is impossible to predict—but for that very reason, these women confound the wishes of their gray-haired counterparts. Perhaps a decades-long practice of extinguishing the young for the sake of their elders has created a movement in which the desires and interests of young women are accorded reality only insofar as they align with older women’s intentions. But unlike the unborn, politically conscious young women have a voice—and a vote.
