The Dobbs decision was the capstone to decades of work by opponents of legalized abortion, finally returning the issue back to the states. Yet some presidential hopefuls are now finding themselves boxed into unpopular policy plans that severely restrict access to abortion, while others give non-answers on possible federal actions. 

Just before midnight on Thursday, Governor DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in the state of Florida — one of the most restrictive laws in the country. Since Dobbs, 12 states have banned abortion outright, with Florida and Georgia right behind them in banning the practice at six weeks, before most women even know they are pregnant. 

Mr. DeSantis’s overnight bill signing is a stark departure from the usual fanfare that accompanies his policy announcements, especially for legislation of such importance. By contrast, the Florida governor in 2021 signed a bill restricting ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting while on air with “Fox & Friends.” Last year, he held a celebratory press conference for nearly 30 minutes to sign the Parent Rights in Education Act, which critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. 

On Thursday night, Mr. DeSantis put out a short statement with a still image of himself signing the legislation. On Friday, Politico reported that Mr. DeSantis made no mention of the six-week ban during a speech at Liberty University. 

The policy director for the conservative American Principles Project, Jon Schweppe, told the Sun that the Republican Party needs to come to a clear message on what it wants to do at the federal level, because many of the state-level restrictions that have been adopted paint the party in a bad light. 

“There’s a lot of different approaches for the Republicans,” he said. “For a long time we’ve been arguing against late-term abortion, which is a 70–30 issue for us. We’ve also supported a ‘pain capable’ bill,” a 20-week ban, “that’s worked for a long time.”

He argued that Republicans mistakenly ceded ground to supporters of abortion rights by not laying out substantive policy goals after the Dobbs decision. Mr. Schweppe believes the Florida governor can be a champion of opposing abortion rights while also explaining to the country that his state record on abortion would not be his goal as president. 

“If I were DeSantis I would say: ‘The people of Florida wanted a six-week bill, so that’s what we did. If I was president I would fight for a 15-week bill, which is where a lot of Americans are.” 

Republicans “need to get back on comfortable footing,” Mr. Schweppe said.

The measure may prove to be politically poisonous, even in a state as red as Florida. According to a poll from the University of North Florida, 75 percent of residents either strongly or somewhat oppose the six-week abortion ban. 

In addition to Mr. DeSantis, other potential presidential candidates have danced around the issue. 

A U.S. senator of South Carolina, Tim Scott, announced on Wednesday he would be forming an exploratory committee for president and was immediately inundated with questions about his position on abortion. 

In an interview with CBS News after his announcement, Mr. Scott would not commit to supporting Senator Graham’s 15-week abortion ban and tried to pivot to Democrats’ record on “abortion up until the day of birth.”

“I am 100 percent pro-life and I do believe we should have a robust conversation on what’s happening on a very important topic,” he said, dodging the interviewer’s question of whether he would support any federal limit on abortion. 

By the end of the day, Mr. Scott said he would “definitely” sign a 20-week ban if he were president. “Democrats want to make this a federal issue of having abortion into the third trimester. That is something that puts us in the company of China and North Korea … we cannot go there,” he told WMUR in New Hampshire. In another twist, he later told Fox News that he would consider a 15-week ban. 

Ambassador Haley — the only woman in the race — praised the Supreme Court for its Dobbs decision in 2022, saying it “puts the debate back where it belongs — at the state level, closest to the people.” However, she stated her desire to find a “consensus” at the federal level. 

In an interview with NBC News, Mrs. Haley said that she would consider her options if she was elected president. “I think what Lindsey Graham has put on the table is 15 weeks,” she said. “And I think if we’re looking at 15 weeks, what we need to understand is we are not okay with abortion up until the time of birth. And so we should at least decide when is it okay.

“Is that consensus 15 weeks? Is it ten weeks? Is it six weeks? I don’t know what that is, but we need to figure this out.”

President Trump has openly admitted that opposing legal abortion is a politically toxic move for his party. In a Truth Social post after the midterm elections last year, he said it “wasn’t my fault” that Republicans did poorly. “It was the ‘abortion issue’, poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on no exceptions, even in the case of rape, incest, or life of the mother, that lost large numbers of voters,” the former president wrote. 

A sign of the politics around the abortion question is the fact that none of the declared Republican presidential candidates mentioned the issue in their campaign announcements. For decades, Republican presidential hopefuls always stuck with the tag lines that abortion is wrong, Roe v. Wade should be overturned, and the issue should be returned to the states. 

Two elections from just this month show the power of the issue for general election voters.

In Wisconsin, Judge Janet Protasiewicz won a landslide victory to flip a seat on the state supreme court after explicitly saying she would rule to strike down her state’s 1849 abortion ban. In Chicago, a liberal candidate, Brandon Johnson, narrowly won the mayoral race after painting his opponent as a “MAGA Republican” because he had previously stated he was personally in favor of restricting abortion. 

Yet given how important the abortion issue is to evangelicals — a key voting bloc in the primary — Republicans will continue to face questions about how they would “protect the unborn” at the federal level, something that has been proven poisonous in nearly every election since the Dobbs decision.