“I think many, many in our ranks right now are ignoring the results of the midterms,” Republican congressperson Nancy Mace said in an interview Thursday afternoon with Vanity Fair. The House had just finished passing two antiabortion measures—one of Republicans’ first acts since assuming the majority this year. Mace, a two-term South Carolina congresswoman, characterized the effort as “misguided,” and told reporters the bills were a sign Republicans “learned nothing” from their poor showing in November. Still, Mace voted in favor of both measures. They were “two relatively easy pro-life bills that everybody can get behind,” she explains. Plus, they weren’t going to go anywhere. “What we did this week is just pay lip service to life because the bills we worked on aren’t gonna go anywhere in the Senate. They are not ever going to go to the president’s desk to be signed,” she says. “[They] don’t make a difference in women’s lives every single day.”
Mace, who represents Charleston, appears to be a case of a swing-district Republican stuck in the middle. She says she’s heard from a number of members who represent districts like hers. “They’re either swing districts or they’re Biden districts, or maybe they’re in Republican plus one or two or three districts, where they share the same frustrations,” she says. There’s been little reckoning among Republicans despite a lackluster midterms performance largely defined by the end of Roe v. Wade. House Republicans’ two controversial antiabortion measures were a resolution to formally condemn attacks on pro-life facilities (which passed with the support of three Democrats, Vicente Gonzalez, Chrissy Houlahan, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez), and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, intended to impose new criminal penalties on doctors who don’t resuscitate babies “born alive” after attempted abortions, which passed on party lines.
Abortion-access advocates were quick to condemn the move. “It is yet another attempt by anti-abortion politicians to spread misinformation as a means to their warped political end: to ban safe and legal abortion,” Jacqueline Ayers, the senior vice president of policy, organizing, and campaigns at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement regarding the Born Alive bill. “Let’s be clear: Doctors are already required to provide appropriate medical care by law. This is not how medical care works. It’s wrong, irresponsible, and dangerous to suggest otherwise.” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Republicans introduced the bills as part of their “march to criminalize abortion care. To impose a nationwide ban. To set into motion government-mandated pregnancies,” in a speech on the House floor.
Mace is hardly pro-choice, but she thinks abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest go too far. Back in 2019, she shared her story of being raped as a teenager to push for the South Carolina Senate–at the time, she was a member of the state’s House–to include exceptions for rape and incest in its six-week “heartbeat” abortion ban. They were ultimately included; the legislation passed. (This past week the South Carolina State Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional on privacy grounds.) “What I have seen when we have these debates and these conversations oftentimes, particularly in conservative states, is women’s voices are missing,” she says. “I just had sort of gotten fed up with it and a bill written by a man who didn’t have that perspective.”
Now she’s arguing there’s some kind of middle ground on abortion access. Specifically, she thinks that there is room to work with Democrats on expanding medical services for women, particularly in rural areas, and making birth control more accessible. “If you want to get serious about life, one of the things you could do that I believe would have a chance in both chambers would be ensuring that every woman has access to birth control,” she says. “That should not be controversial.”
And if Republicans continue down the extreme path on abortion, she says, “there’ll be political complications two years from now, whether that’s the White House or us retaining the majority in the US House.”
Abigail Tracy
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