Has North Carolina Found an Abortion Compromise?
North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers overrode a veto by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper last night, enacting a ban on most abortions after 12 weeks of gestation. The ban will take effect in July.
The Old North State has frequently offered a preview of new currents in American conservatism over the past decade, hosting skirmishes about gerrymandering, restrictive voting laws, and spurious fraud claims before they became national issues. Now it could be setting a model for the nation on abortion battles too. Unlike in other, more solidly red states where GOP politicians have aimed for total or near-total bans on abortion, North Carolina Republican lawmakers opted for a law that would further restrict such procedures but allow most to continue. Under current law, abortions are legal up to 20 weeks.
Cooper and Democrats in the state fiercely opposed the law, and the override will make abortion central to the state’s elections in 2024, when North Carolina will see a heated contest over the governorship and is expected to be a presidential battleground. Those races will test whether voters in a closely divided state view the 12-week ban as a reasonable compromise, or revolt in the same manner as voters in states that have passed or attempted to pass more stringent laws.
[David A. Graham: The state election that could change abortion access in the South]
Yesterday’s vote overriding the veto was the culmination of a dizzying series of events. In November, Republicans gained seats in the General Assembly, nearly establishing a veto-proof majority but falling just short. Cooper and other Democrats placed his veto—especially his power to veto restrictions on abortion—at the center of the Democratic messaging during the election.
“I’m not personally on the ballot. My ability to stop bad legislation is. The effectiveness of the veto is on the line,” Cooper told me in October. If Republicans went on to win supermajorities in November, he warned, “there will be extreme legislation on abortion passed.”
After the votes were counted, Democrats managed to deny Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state House by a single vote. But in April, State Representative Tricia Cotham, a Charlotte-area Democrat, shocked the state’s political class by switching to the Republican Party. The reasons for Cotham’s switch remain obscure. She’s the scion of a Democratic political family, and speculated reasons for her jump include personal pique and the lingering effects of long COVID. Whatever the reason, Cotham’s switch gave Republicans supermajorities in both houses and paved the way for abortion restrictions.
In January, Cotham joined other Democrats in sponsoring a bill to codify Roe v. Wade into state law. (In the GOP-controlled General Assembly, that bill was never anything more than a gesture.) Yet after her party switch, Cotham voted for the Republican abortion bill, which was designed in part to garner her vote as well as the support of other caucus moderates.
Cooper, other Democrats, and pro-abortion-rights groups rallied furiously against the bill. They hoped they might be able to pressure one or more of a handful of Republicans in swing districts to vote to sustain the veto, but when the Senate and then the House took up the override yesterday evening, Republican leaders kept their ranks together.
The new law makes North Carolina a pioneer for a compromise approach to the abortion issue—one that could defuse the issue, but could also fail to satisfy either side of the debate. As The Washington Post’s Caroline Kitchener and Rachel Roubein report, “It is the first new abortion ban to pass since the fall of Roe v. Wade that does not outlaw all or most abortions, effectively allowing roughly 90 percent of abortions to continue.” As states across the South have restricted abortion, North Carolina has become a magnet for women seeking abortions from all around the region, as Cooper emphasized to me in October.
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Even with the new restrictions, North Carolina will be among the more permissive southern states. Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi all ban abortion in almost all circumstances. Florida recently passed a six-week ban, the same as Georgia’s. South Carolina’s law remains in flux after the state supreme court blocked a six-week ban, and a bipartisan bloc of female senators has resisted strict measures.
Republicans have sought to portray the 12-week law as a reasonable, “mainstream” compromise. The law includes exceptions for rape and incest up to 20 weeks, and for fetal life-limiting anomalies up to 24 weeks. But Democrats hope that even this bill will go too far for many voters ahead of the 2024 election. “North Carolinians now understand that Republicans are unified in their assault on women’s reproductive freedom and we are energized to fight back on this and other critical issues facing our state,” Cooper, who is not eligible for reelection in 2024, said in a statement last night.
The likely Republican candidate for governor, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, is a strident abortion opponent, and Democrats hope that the extremity of his position will help them hold the governor’s office. The state has consistently voted for Republican presidential candidates except in 2008, when Barack Obama won the state, but Democrats see the state as winnable in 2024, and will seek to make the campaign a referendum on abortion rights.
Whether voters endorse Republicans’ attempt at a more moderate path or punish them at the polls, the result is likely to offer an indicator of the post-Roe politics of abortion in other purple states around the nation.