Is the Flipped Alabama Seat a Sign IVF Will Be a Big Issue in November? It’s Complicated.
When a Democrat wins a race in a majority-white district in Alabama, it’s almost always remarkable. But even then, when Alabama House District 10 flipped from red to blue in Tuesday’s election, it made an unusually big splash for a state-level office. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, noting that the district had heavily favored Donald Trump in 2016, called it a “political earthquake” and a “harbinger of things to come.” The reason for this was in the Democratic candidate’s strategy. She had campaigned largely on reproductive rights, a little more than a month after the state Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos were to be considered human, imperiling in vitro fertilization clinics in the state.
And it was a resounding win: The Democrat, Marilyn Lands, had won 62 percent of the vote to her opponent’s 37. The question such a landslide victory inevitably raises is one with national implications: Is IVF going to be a problem for Republicans in November?
It’s a reasonable question, and it’s possible there is a sign of IVF’s potency in this race. But the reality of the election tells a somewhat more muddied story.
First, it should be noted that Alabama House District 10 is an unusual one. The district abuts Huntsville, a city known nationally for its aerospace industry. It includes the airport and the Redstone Arsenal, a military base that employs a significant portion of the town’s population, as well as the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, home to Space Camp. It’s highly educated, wealthy, and populated by transplants from all over the country. In other words, Huntsville tells us less about Alabama and more about the nation as a whole—making the flip a less impressive feat than had it been ruby-red Mobile, for example. Still, it’s a useful data point for Democrats strategizing around similar wealthy, educated suburbs around the country.
The district’s history bears this out: While it did vote for Trump by 13 points in 2016, it came out overwhelmingly for Doug Jones against Roy Moore in 2018, with a dramatic swing of 42 points from the state’s previous U.S. Senate race. And while in most other elections, the district has voted Republican, its voters supported Jones again (though to a lesser degree) in his ill-fated campaign against Tommy Tuberville in 2020, and, notably, in 2018, went against Tom Parker—the state Supreme Court chief justice who cited biblical reasoning in his ruling for the IVF case. In 2020, the district voted for Trump again, but only by 1 point. So it’s only barely a Republican district.
Still, Lands had run previously and failed. But there were a couple of other elements Lands had on her side this time. In what may have been the most crucial factor, this race was a special election, meaning there was no presidential or gubernatorial name at the top of the ticket to encourage mass turnout and party-line voting. (Fewer than 6,000 ballots were cast.) And she was, by all accounts, simply a strong candidate, having gained attention, funding, and experience from her previous bid.
“She was a good campaigner,” said Steve Flowers, a longtime syndicated political columnist in Alabama, noting that she ran a sophisticated and well-funded operation. “??People have got to like somebody, and she was likable.”
But Lands’ success clearly had a lot to do with her focus on reproductive rights. As part of her campaign, Lands put out an ad in which she shared her own abortion story from a nonviable pregnancy. Her materials heavily featured an Alabama woman who more recently had to travel out of state for an abortion when her fetus had a fatal condition. Her opponent, Teddy Powell, stayed quiet on those issues and focused on more local matters instead.
“That is definitely a national wake-up call, because she ran totally on reproductive rights and the abortion issue and the IVF issue,” Flowers said. “That district is reflective of a national audience, which tells me it’s an Achilles’ heel.”
It’s been more than a year and a half since Roe v. Wade was overturned, and we’ve had plenty of time to see the practical fallout of that decision, in ways that may have swayed some moderates who underestimated the effect that the Republican campaign against abortion would have. It’s not just the restrictions on abortion, many people are realizing. It’s not even just extreme abortion bills with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother. It’s also the other health care issues put at risk when lawmakers and judges decide that life begins at conception: birth control pills, IUDs, and fertility treatment, as well as precautionary refusals of care from doctors and health care providers who fear legal risks.
“If you’re someone on the margins who, after the Dobbs decision, bought into the idea that it’s not going to change anything, that people will still be able to access health care, that it’ll just bring the issue back to the states, a lot of what happened in the last year might have changed your mind,” said Nicole Kalaf-Hughes, a political science professor at Bowling Green State University. “This is a natural consequence of Dobbs. Two years ago, a lot of people were like, ‘It won’t affect anything.’ But this is a natural implication.”
The politics of IVF are likely to be slightly different from abortion. IVF has less stigma than abortion does, and while having an abortion is a common experience, it’s not commonly spoken about. A conservative pro-life person is more likely to know someone who is open about an experience with IVF, and to therefore feel less politically entrenched over it.
And according to Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers University–Camden and a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, the anti-abortion message has been effective for Republicans because it’s been able to be presented as a black-and-white matter: Life begins at conception. Democrats, meanwhile, have historically struggled to land on a unified and clear message about abortion. IVF, Dittmar said, has flipped that dynamic. “This one feels, for Democrats, a little cleaner,” she said. “And there’s more clarity on Republican and conservative hypocrisy. It’s: ‘You’re limiting something that can allow life.’ ”
Where Dittmar sees the potential power of IVF in an election is in mobilizing wealthy, college-educated women who are already inclined to vote for Democrats. Already, college-educated white women have seen a huge political shift over the Trump years and come out as solidly blue.
“So the question is: To what degree will this kind of messaging mobilize voters who otherwise won’t turn out, women who aren’t super excited about octogenarian men at the top of the ticket?” Dittmar said. She noted that college-educated white women do vote at a higher rate than men, but turnout can always be increased.
Because voters tend to care more about economic issues, Dittmar doesn’t believe that IVF will become a major factor in November, unless any states decide to put initiatives addressing it on the ballot. She doesn’t see it changing voters’ minds in any significant way. Just as abortion plays better in some areas than others, IVF is likely to be most useful in purple-ish suburban areas with large numbers of educated and wealthier women. (IVF typically costs tens of thousands of dollars.) In those areas, a focus on IVF along with other reproductive rights could help generate greater funding and attention, just as constitutional abortion rights did for states where it was on the ballot in 2022.
Where IVF matters is a question of where it is threatened. In Alabama, Lands got a boost from the state Supreme Court decision and the tepid response from the state Legislature. (“You get a proximity effect there that you might not get in the fall,” Kalaf-Hughes said. “If I’m an Alabama Republican, I would have been looking at the Supreme Court and saying, ‘Too soon, too far, you should have waited until next year.’ But you still might have a long enough time frame between the decision and November.”) In Alabama, the ruling placed immediate limitations on IVF treatments in the state; it’s unclear what will happen in other states between now and November.
This particular dynamic of a hard-right state Legislature and a purple district made for an ideal place for IVF to be played up as the election’s decisive issue. In more progressive states where IVF isn’t threatened, it likely won’t matter much. In deep-red states, such as Alabama, it’ll make a difference in a few local races, but it won’t make a dent on the overall state makeup. The place where IVF might actually be significant, Kalaf-Hughes said, is in a gerrymandered state where the legislature is farther right than the overall population and is likely to make the population feel their rights are at risk.
“It’s not going to change the state,” Kalaf-Hughes said. “It may not change national politics. But in races like this, when people are in margins, issues like this will swing voters.”
For more on Marilyn Lands and what the national Democrats can learn from her victory, listen to What Next, Slate’s daily news podcast.
