(Image: instagram/@cynthiaenixon) Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon is back in the news for all the wrong reasons. Nixon decided to virtue signal on abortion by sending out a picture of herself lounging on a boat wearing a cap that read “Make Abortion Great Again.” In the same week, “Smile” singer Lily Allen was laughing in an interview about how she has had so many abortions that she cannot remember the precise number. It is only the latest example of how the messaging on the left could be alienating many Americans on the third anniversary of the Dobbs decision.
Nixon posted the picture on Instagram with the caption: “In addition to kicking 17 million Americans off their healthcare, Trump’s big ugly bill will strip critical funding to [Planned Parenthood] for non-abortion-related medical care.” She then added, “And of course abortion is healthcare too!” before urging her 1.7 million Instagram followers to call their representatives and tell them “to vote NO on this horrifying bill.”
Even liberals wrote in to say that the cavalier attitude was “a bit much.”
For Lily Allen, abortions are so trivial that she lost count of her own. During a recent episode of her Miss Me? Podcast, the 40-year-old singer explained that she had several abortions before finding a birth control method that worked for her: “Abortions, I’ve had a few. But then again, I can’t remember exactly how many…. I think maybe like, I wanna say five. Four or five?”
Notably, abortions are actually up since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the question to the individual states to decide.
What is striking about these controversies is how they run against the narrative.
We just passed the third anniversary of Dobbs. Gallup is reporting a record gap between men and women over abortion since Dobbs:
The gap has expanded since 2022 because pro-choice identity has dipped among men, from 48% to 41%, while it has held steady among women. Currently, 32% of women and 54% of men identify as pro-life.
Similarly, there is now a record-high 17-point gap between women (57%) and men (40%) in their belief that abortion is morally acceptable and a record-high 15-point gap in women’s (56%) and men’s (41%) support for abortion being legal in all or most circumstances. These divergences are also the widest since 2022 and represent a marked change from the two decades prior to Dobbs, when women’s and men’s views were much closer.
Overall support for abortion remains strong, though it has fallen slightly since the post-Dobbs rise. What is clear is that the issue was not determinative in the last election. Democrats put a huge emphasis on abortion in the Trump-Harris election. Democrats loaded up ballots with abortion-related initiatives or referendums to bring out the vote. However, they found that pro-choice voters supported Trump in higher-than-expected numbers.
Making light of abortions is unlikely to change that trajectory in the polls, but Democrats continue to struggle with media being driven by figures on their far left going into the critical midterm elections.
With the anniversary of Dobbs, there is no suggestion that the Court will reconsider its ruling or that the Court is expected to change anytime soon. In the meantime, in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, the Court has allowed states to defund Planned Parenthood, which receives a significant amount of its money from the federal and state governments.
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/michelle-poolhouse-6123d8f630084e94a9d8209a1c885e7b.jpeg)
