SACRAMENTO, California (LifeSiteNews) – In an apparent attempt to galvanize the pro-abortion faithful in the final days before Tuesday’s midterm elections, Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom gave a posthumous pardon Friday to a woman who committed illegal abortions in the first half of the 20th century.
Fox News reported that Newsom pardoned Laura Miner, who in 1949 was convicted of abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion, which she did from 1934 to 1948, long before California legalized abortion in 1967 and the U.S. Supreme Court forced all 50 states to allow it in Roe v. Wade.
Miner, who served 19 months in jail and 27 months on parole, passed away in 1976 but not before declaring her “conscience is clear” because her killing of unwanted babies “helped humanity.”
With Roe having been overturned this year, Newsom said that Miner was “a powerful reminder of the generations of people who fought for reproductive freedom in this country, and the risks that so many Americans now face in a post-Roe world.”
Californians were voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections on a ballot initiative to add a “fundamental right to choose to have an abortion” to their state constitution, part of a Democrat push to insulate state-level abortion “access” from potential federal pro-life laws and symbolically appeal to pro-abortion voters.
While abortion is far from danger in the solidly blue California, and the amendment is likely to pass, the politics of abortion post-Roe are uncharted waters for most of the country.
Democrats have placed much of their electoral hopes this year on the overturn of Roe driving turnout by scaring Americans about the imagined fallout of losing abortion “access.” But while polls show a majority of Americans are not yet willing to completely ban the procedure, polls also show that the public is closer to the mainstream Republican position than to the Democrat stance of unlimited, unregulated abortion throughout the entirety of pregnancy and at taxpayer expense.
Further, a New York Times/Siena College poll released last month found that while independent female voters had favored Democrats by 14 points in September, a month later they had shifted to favoring Republicans by 18, suggesting that whatever “abortion bounce” Democrats may have enjoyed was quickly superseded by voters’ more pressing concerns about issues such as crime and the cost of living.
Properly gauging public opinion on abortion has long been hobbled by inconsistently or inaccurately framed poll questions, popular misconceptions about what abortion laws and rulings have and have not done, and discrepancies between what voters think of the issue and how they prioritize it. Ultimately, a more accurate read of the issue will likely not become clear until voters’ reactions to newly enforced state laws start being reflected in elections such as Tuesday’s.
