Not so long ago, Republicans called Democrats the ‘party of abortion’ as an insult, or a pre-election attack line. Now, it is the Republicans, as the party against abortion, who are losing. This is a grim reality for Americans who believe that the unborn deserve protection.

Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the ballot, the party of abortion keeps winning

Since June last year, when the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs, overturning the right to an abortion under Roe vs Wade and returning the issue back to state legislatures, the Democrats have won over and over in elections all over America by campaigning to ‘preserve access’, as they like to say, to abortion services.

Yesterday, it happened again – in Virginia, Ohio, and even the profoundly Republican state of Kentucky. In Kentucky, the Democratic Governor Andy Beshear, who has campaigned for exemptions to the state’s abortion ban, won re-election, too.

In Virginia, the Democrats took full control of the General Assembly after Republicans had campaigned for a law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation (In France, it’s 14 weeks, by the way). The Virginia result is a blow to Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Governor, who has been held up as a poster-boy for what a successful post-Trumpian Republican leader might look like.

In Ohio, where a Republican six-week ban proposal is going through the courts, voters chose overwhelmingly to support a constitutional amendment to allow abortion up to ‘foetal viability’ – the point at which a baby has ‘a significant likelihood of survival’ outside the womb. The measure, known as Issue 1, also removes the need for parental consent for children who want to make ‘reproductive decisions’. Critics of the measure argued that it effectively allowed abortion up to and including partial-birth terminations and that the language about consent would be used to block parents having any say over gender-reassignment surgeries for their children. But the critics lost and Issue 1 was passed.

Pro-life Republicans will lick their wounds, blame each other, and point to uniquely unhelpful factors in each race. But the pattern is now so obvious as to be irrefutable. Since Dobbs, in elections where abortion is on the ballot, the party of abortion keeps winning.

The pro-abortion electoral tide could be stemmed in next year’s presidential elections, when turn-out will be much higher and the highly mobilised ‘reproductive choice’ lobby will have less sway. But for the Democrats, who are losing on the economy, on immigration and so much else, the tactic is clear. We can expect the party of abortion to add ballot ‘reproductive rights’ measures in every state in November next year to drive up their support. And Joe Biden, a practising Catholic whose Church teaches that abortion is an excommunicable sin, will make it a major campaign issue – assuming his re-election bid isn’t itself terminated in the coming months.