The pattern over the past 25 years has been fairly steady: Many countries with prohibitions against abortion have unwound those laws either slightly or substantially. Places like Nepal and Ireland and Colombia have loosened bans on abortion since the turn of the century, as have dozens of other countries.
Most countries, of course, didn’t effect any changes at all from 2000 to the beginning of this year. Two, Nicaragua and Poland, scaled back access to abortion.
On Friday, the United States joined them. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization repealed its decision in Roe v. Wade, allowing states to prohibit abortion entirely. Several states that had previously passed “trigger” laws that would go into effect upon repeal of Roe quickly implemented such bans.
It’s tricky to extrapolate outward from three examples, certainly. But it’s worth noting — particularly given broader international trends — that Poland, Nicaragua and the United States had all moved measurably away from liberal democracy before abortion bans were expanded.
The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project evaluates leadership and decision-making in countries on dozens of metrics, compiling scores aimed at standardizing assessments of how closely nations hew to democratic norms. If we plot those scores over time for the three countries that have scaled back access to abortion, we see a consistent pattern.
Nicaragua’s ban on abortion was implemented in 2006, as the country’s recent embrace of liberal democracy was beginning to recede. Poland, once rated as robustly as the United States, became more illiberal beginning in 2015 with the ascent of Law and Justice party leader Andrzej Duda to the presidency. In early 2021, a court-ordered reversal of access to abortions went into effect. Then there was the United States.
You’ve probably already noticed two moderating factors. The first is that the United States’ movement away from liberal democracy, as measured by V-Dem, has been modest. The second is that, both here and in Poland, the changes were effected by the courts.
So we look at another set of data from V-Dem: party-level views of liberalism. (While V-Dem measures support for liberal democracy at the national level, it measures illiberalism at the party level. So to reflect the same pattern as shown above, we’ve inverted the vertical axis on the graph below. In each case, lower lines mean less support for liberal democracy.) In both Poland and the United States, the parties with control of the relevant courts have moved dramatically away from liberalism.
As Max Fisher wrote for the New York Times in September, there are other patterns that the United States’ retraction of abortion access matches. He pointed to a report from the organization Freedom House that noted a connection between increased authoritarianism and attacks on women’s rights.
He also spoke with Harvard University’s Steven Levitsky, a researcher on democracy. When a minority gains power, as the Republicans did during the Trump administration thanks to the electoral college and the distribution of Senate seats, those in power “become likelier to overrule the majority on issues important to the minority that put them in power,” Fisher wrote in summary of Levitsky’s analysis. Overturning Roe was a minority position.
Again, it’s possible that we’re overfitting this link between the decline in democracy and the scaling back of access to abortion. After all, a some countries have moved away from liberal democracy without changing laws governing abortion access. The United States, Poland and Nicaragua might simply have become more illiberal — to widely varying degrees! — and, at the same time, have contracted that access.
But we can say the other countries in which abortion access has been scaled back in the past 20 years are ones where democracy was in decline. We can also say, as I have before, that the reversal of Roe was a function of a decision made by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that gained its power thanks to the unbalanced allocation of power in — that is, to the more illiberal parts of — the American system.
