Opinion

Politics has obliterated the common ground on abortion

For decades after the Supreme Court made abortion legal across the United States in 1973, Democrats and Republicans accepted that internal divisions were acceptable, even inevitable, on the morally fraught subject.

Before the mid-1990s, Republican women serving in Congress favored abortion rights by a 2-to-1 margin, and there were substantial numbers of male lawmakers in the GOP who voted that way; now, that breed of Republican has gone all but extinct on Capitol Hill. The last two Republicans in the House who supported abortion rights retired in 2019, and in the Senate, Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) are the only remaining GOP members who do.