Pro-choice Democrat Marilyn Lands flipped a Republican state legislative district in Alabama by focusing on IVF and abortion rights. It’s another sign that reproductive rights are a potent issue in 2024 elections.
Last month’s shocking decision by the Alabama Supreme Court treating embryos created for IVF treatments as subject to wrongful-death laws accelerated an already powerful pro-choice backlash against Republican-backed anti-abortion extremism. That’s true even in Alabama itself, where a Democratic candidate in a state legislative special election campaigning almost exclusively on abortion rights flipped a Republican district by a 62 percent to 38 percent margin. A hasty effort by Alabama’s GOP-controlled legislature to protect the IVF industry from the court ruling was supposed to stanch the wound. Indeed, Republican candidate Teddy Powell in the Huntsville-area Tenth House District stayed away from the abortion issue as basically resolved. But his opponent, Marilyn Lands, proved otherwise, as Al.com reports:
Of her victory Tuesday, Lands said, “Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation. Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.”
To be clear, Lands didn’t barnstorm only against the potential criminalization of IVF and the fetal “personhood” assumptions behind the state supreme court’s decision but for positive abortion rights, even citing her own abortion experience as an example of the need for very different policies, as the Washington Post noted:
Lands, a licensed mental health counselor, also made the issue personal. In a television ad, she shared her own abortion story from 20 years ago, when she terminated a nonviable pregnancy, and noted that women facing the same in Alabama today must leave the state to have an abortion.
Lands ran for the House seat in 2022 and lost by seven percentage points. Her Republican opponent, David Cole, resigned the seat and pleaded guilty to committing fraud by running and voting in the district using a fraudulent address, triggering the special election.
To be clear, the outcome of this special election (an arena in which Democrats have done unusually well of late) doesn’t significantly affect the composition of the Alabama House, which remains overwhelmingly Republican. And the relatively affluent district full of highly educated voters (thanks to Huntsville’s aerospace, defense, and IT industries) isn’t typical of the state, though it is hardly a liberal bastion, either (Trump narrowly carried it in 2020). Probably most significant is that the abortion issue transformed a contest the GOP candidate had hoped would turn on other issues, as Politico observed:
Powell accused Lands of turning it into a “national race” by focusing on reproductive rights, while his campaign has primarily emphasized issues like inflation and local infrastructure.
“It’s certainly an issue that needs to be dealt with, but not our top issue,” Powell said of reproductive rights. “I don’t think that this is the issue that wins or loses the race.”
Clearly, that was wrong.
Republicans already nervous about the national fallout from the Alabama ruling and from Donald Trump’s reported recent decision to back a 15-week national abortion ban will be whispering with one another about this otherwise obscure Deep South legislative contest.
