There are any number of grounds on which a pro-lifer might oppose a national ban on abortion.
This mini-controversy started with a lie. The Michigan Democratic Party publicized a clip from a radio interview Mike Rogers did with a conservative evangelical host. The party said that Mike Rogers had “confirmed in a new interview that he would vote for a national abortion ban.” Abdul El-Sayed made the same claim. Rogers didn’t say that. He said that he’s pro-life.
There are any number of grounds on which a pro-lifer might oppose a national ban on abortion. One might think such a national ban on abortion would, for the foreseeable future, get too far ahead of public opinion to be wise or sustainable. (I think this is correct.) One might think that the Constitution leaves abortion policy to be set by the states. I think this view is incorrect, but it is certainly one that some sincere pro-lifers hold.
Rogers responded to this hit by posting a short video saying that he respects Michigan’s decision in favor of permissive abortion laws and that, in the Senate, he would do nothing to change Michigan’s permissive abortion laws. That’s consistent with what he said in the interview.
The tweet accompanying the Rogers video, though, goes further than the video, simply endorsing the pro-choice position: “This decision is one of the hardest decisions a woman will make in her entire life and it should be handled with her family and her doctor. Period.” The tweet also refers to Michigan’s enshrinement of “a woman’s right to choose” in its state constitution. At least Rogers is still uncomfortable enough with abortion not to use the word in either the tweet or the video!
I don’t think there was any political imperative for Rogers to go this far. If he thought so, then why didn’t he use the right-to-choose, between-a-woman-and-her-doctor language in the video? It does not seem well thought through.
Even if Rogers means to endorse the pro-choice position, though, pro-lifers have reasons to prefer him to El-Sayed — even on abortion. As Michael Fragoso points out, Rogers would, compared to El-Sayed, be much more likely to vote for judicial nominees who would allow protections for unborn children to stand and to vote against the other kind of nominees — as well as against federal funding for elective abortions and against a national law forcing states to withdraw their own protections for unborn children. As Fragoso also says, these are much more likely to be issues before the Senate during the next six years than a national ban is.
I disagree with Fragoso, however, on larger questions of what we can infer about the politics of abortion from the behavior of Republican candidates since Dobbs. A few candidates did indeed highlight the pro-abortion extremism of their Democratic opponents in the 2022 races, and won; pro-life incumbents have a pretty solid track record of winning their races in 2022 and 2024; the pro-life challengers who blew what looked like winnable races in 2022 mostly tied themselves to opposition to abortion even in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the mother’s life rather than taking a more viable pro-life line; and the issue has very likely gotten less salient since then. Nor do I think that Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, whose most notable comment during this campaign has been that people mad about high beef prices “have so many proteins to choose from,” should have the last word about messaging strategies.
But these are arguments for after the election — an election which I hope El-Sayed loses.