NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} s anyone who has recently turned on a TV in Virginia could tell you, a deluge of Democratic ads about abortion have been raining down on Virginia voters in the weeks leading up to the state’s November 7 legislative elections.
The Democratic messaging in blue Virginia paints Republicans as determined to ban abortion without exception — an argument that bends the truth past the breaking point. The proposal that Republicans would pursue — if they capture the Democrat-controlled senate and keep their narrow majority in the house of delegates — would reduce Virginia’s limit on elective abortions from 26 weeks and six days to 15 weeks, with exceptions for cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is endangered.
Virginia house speaker Todd Gilbert has been clear the 15-week bill is the only gestational limit he would bring up for a vote. “Some of our candidates are adamantly pro-life but they understand that this is where Virginians are and they have embraced this legislative proposal as a basic framework of where we intend to be,” Gilbert said last week. “And I have been exceedingly clear that we will not go beyond it as long as I am speaker.”
While many Virginia Republicans have expressed support in principle for protecting life throughout pregnancy, every existing abortion law in America includes language to at least protect the life of the mother. Several Republican members have made it clear that they would not support earlier limits, and Republicans would only have the slimmest majority if they manage to capture both houses. Democrats currently hold a 22–18 majority in the state senate, while Republicans hold a 51–46 majority in the house of delegates, so there’s no chance of Republicans who would push earlier limits capturing a majority of either chamber.
Virginia Democrats, by contrast, have almost unanimously rallied behind measures that would make abortion legal throughout pregnancy. This year, 21 of 22 Democrats in the Virginia senate voted for an amendment to the state constitution that would create a fundamental right to abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy. House Democrat Kathy Tran infamously admitted a bill she introduced would allow abortion through 40 weeks if a lone doctor said it was necessary to protect the mother’s mental health, and the constitutional amendment wouldn’t even require such a justification.
All you have to do is look at a map to know that Virginia could become a mecca for late abortions in the coming years, even under current law that allows abortion for any reason before the 27th week of pregnancy. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina all have laws on the books limiting elective abortion to the first six to twelve weeks of pregnancy, and without a 15-week limit, Virginia would geographically serve as a logical destination for late-term abortions.
Under Virginia’s existing law, there were 346 abortions performed in Virginia after 15 weeks in 2020 alone, according to the CDC. One maternity website notes that at 15 weeks, “Your baby is looking more like a little person, with eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, hair, and well-defined fingers and toes. If you could see inside your womb, you’d catch your baby sucking a thumb, yawning, stretching, and making faces.” Infants born as early as 21 weeks have survived their stays in the neonatal intensive care unit and grown up to be healthy children, but in 2020 more than 100 abortions were performed later than 21 weeks in Virginia. These numbers would surely swell without a 15-week limit due to Virginia’s proximity to states across the South that limit or generally prohibit elective abortion.
An October Washington Post poll found that, despite the big Democratic advantage in abortion-themed TV ads, voters in blue Virginia are evenly split on changing the law to implement a 15-week limit: Forty-six percent support, 47 percent oppose such legislation. The poll found that Republican governor Glenn Youngkin has a strong approval rating — 54 percent approve to 38 percent disapprove. Youngkin has campaigned on a 15-week limit, and his PAC put $1.4 million behind an ad contrasting the GOP position against Democratic support for late-term abortion.
Yet, the same poll found Democrats had a narrow two-point edge over Republicans on the generic ballot in the campaign for Virginia’s legislature. Virginia voters say they trust Democrats more than Republicans on the issue of abortion by 17 points, and they trust Democrats by an identical 17-point margin on “transgender issues.” The wide discrepancy between those polling results and Youngkin’s stellar job-approval rating suggests that Democratic campaign messaging has worked to generally tar generic Republicans as extreme, even as the messaging has failed against the soft-spoken, sweater-vest-wearing Youngkin for holding the same substantive positions on those issues.