Always good to check in with Ms. Valenti to see what the Anti-Abortion crowd is up to this election season.
The GOP’s 2028 Abortion Strategy in One Word: Massachusetts
Republican candidates will lean into “late” abortion. Democrats need to be ready.
Jessica Valenti
Aug 26, 2026
After four years of struggling to talk about abortion, Republicans think they’ve found the message that will take them through the midterms and into 2028: Massachusetts. In the few weeks since the state legalized abortion throughout pregnancy, conservative pundits, Republican lawmakers, and anti-abortion activists have all glommed onto the new law as ‘proof’ that Democrats are abortion extremists.
Right-wing strategists—whose abortion messages have continually fallen flat with Americans—are certain that this is their in with voters. And last week, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America advised Republican candidates that “going on offense to call out Democrats’ extremism on late-term abortion” moves the polling margin by 4-5 points.
“Pro-life candidates should be relentlessly pressing their opponents over their support for these barbaric, late procedures,” president Marjorie Dannenfelser wrote in a memo. She urged Republicans to be “aggressive” in bringing the conversation back to later abortion, using Massachusetts as a jumping off point.
That means it’s past time for Democrats to get their own abortion messaging in order—namely, by standing up from their defensive crouch and finally telling voters what they want to hear: the government has no place in pregnancy at any point.
For far too long, Democratic candidates have been hesitant to openly support abortion throughout pregnancy—instead relying on calls to “restore Roe,” or suggesting that ‘later’1 abortion almost never happens. But that message is getting harder to credibly (and ethically) maintain.
Republican bans aren’t just driving up the need for later access by making it harder for women to get abortions earlier in their pregnancies2—they’re shining a light on why care must be available at every single stage. Many of the horror stories Americans have heard over the past four years—women going septic, forced to carry doomed pregnancies, or dying in hospitals—have been about patients who were “later” in their pregnancies.
Every day since the end of Roe has proved how dangerous it is for the government to legislate abortion at all. Tepid defenses aren’t enough.
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