After Ohio on Tuesday became the latest state to pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion access, conservatives on Fox News struggled to come to grips with just how unpopular their pro-life agenda has been with voters.
Fox anchor Sean Hannity seemed concerned for Republican candidates’ electability, just as he was in August when Ohioans rejected the GOP-backed effort to make it more difficult for them to do what they did Tuesday.
“If we’re really going to be honest about this, and I consider myself pro-life, but I understand that’s not where the country is,” he groused. Another indicator besides Ohio, he later said, was the poor performance last year of Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, a Republican who said he opposed the right to an abortion even in the case of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother was at stake.
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“I have to believe that is an indication that the women in America, suburban moms, want it probably legal and rare and probably earlier than at the point of viability,” he said.
Fox host and former Trump White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called on the GOP to “not just be a pro-baby party.”
“We must be a pro-mother party. We need a national strategy,” she demanded.
“Tomorrow, I want the House of Representatives passing legislation for men to pay women child support from the moment of conception, legislation to make the child tax credit apply to the unborn, legislation for women to have access to the supplemental food and nutrition program up to two years after childbirth,” she urged. “These are things that could be done today that will make a difference! But until we own this issue as a party, we will lose again, and again, and again.”
Fox contributor Charlie Hurt, meanwhile, acknowledged the GOP’s “awkward” situation.
“This is what happens when you go for 50 years [after] an unelected group of Supreme Court justices take this vitally important issue out of voters’ hands and rule by fiat in Washington,” he said, apparently casting some blame for Republicans’ present inability to garner support on the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision.
“Thankfully we get it returned to the states and returned to voters—it’s a difficult issue, and we’re working through it,” he said. “It’s going to be difficult and it’s going to be awkward. Everybody has got to try to find their voice on it.”
The Washington Times columnist then smeared Democrats as being able to “demagogue the issue very effectively.” Hannity, by the same token, then accused them of “trying to scare women into thinking Republicans don’t want abortion legal under any circumstances.”
Whether it’s demagoguery at play or Americans just not liking what Republicans are offering since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, Ohio’s vote follows similar abortion rights successes not only in California, Michigan and Vermont, but the traditionally red states of Kansas and Kentucky. In 2024, many more states could be added to the list.
One story regarding the Buckeye state’s abortion ban that received considerable attention last year was the plight of a 10-year-old rape victim who had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), in a tweet that he later deleted, claimed that that story was “a lie.”
Jordan appeared on Hannity’s show after McEnany and Hurt, but was not asked about the consequential vote in his home state.
