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.

This isn’t just about what’s morally right, but what’s politically necessary. It’s foolish to think Democratic candidates can continue to sidestep or dismiss abortion throughout pregnancy, especially with Republicans preparing to weaponize Massachusetts’ new law. While the GOP has been making noise about abortion “up until birth” for years—and though Massachusetts isn’t the only state that allows abortion after 24 weeks3—this attack won’t be business as usual.

Republicans are backed into a corner on abortion. Their bans haven’t reduced the number of abortions, but are driving up maternal and infant mortality rates. The longer bans exist, the more likely it is that those statistics will hit close to home for voters; it won’t be long before most Americans know someone who’s been hurt by a ban. That means the already-unpopular laws are primed to become even more hated.

At the same time, the GOP’s pro-woman charade is being undermined and overshadowed by a growing extremist sect that wants to jail or execute women who end their pregnancies. Anti-abortion extremism has become so difficult to hide that Republican leaders floated the idea of doing away with the term ‘pro-life’ because it carries so much baggage. Even the Trump administration has deemed abortion a losing issue, and has distanced itself accordingly.

All of which is to say: anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are desperate for a message that sticks—one that makes it seem like they’re the reasonable ones. They believe Massachusetts is that message.

ICAM with Ms. Valenti. Defend a woman’s body autonomy. The falsehood that a woman just wakes up one day and decides that she doesn’t want a baby in the third trimester – just stop with the foolishness.