Jennifer McCormick, the Democratic candidate to be Indiana’s next governor, announced her plans the other day to preserve women’s reproductive rights if she’s elected.
She meant to give hope to the multitudes of Hoosier women upset—no, angry—that rights they took for granted for a half-century were stripped away two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
What she did, though, is demonstrate just how many reasons reproductive rights advocates in Indiana have to feel demoralized.
McCormick pledged to:
• Direct the Indiana Department of Health to interpret existing laws in a way that maximizes legal access to abortion services. By clarifying regulations, McCormick will work to reduce barriers that clinics and providers face.
• Reproductive health funding will be prioritized in the state budget, ensuring women have the necessary support to access a full range of reproductive health services.
• Shift focus from enforcement to compliance assistance for clinics and providers, creating a more supportive regulatory environment.
• Appoint abortion rights supporters to relevant state boards and commissions, including the Medical Licensing Board, to ensure the state's policy implementation aligns with trusting women and healthcare providers.
• Fight to protect the privacy of Hoosiers’ medical records from prying government officials, including terminated pregnancy reports.
• Use the governor’s office as a platform to defend abortion rights and inform Hoosiers of their reproductive freedoms.
The rhetoric sounds stirring, as if sweeping changes were at hand, but the reality is something else altogether.
What McCormick proposes may give women more platforms to voice their justified discontent, but her plans will do little to combat the sources of that discontent.
That’s not her fault.
Indiana’s political structure just isn’t set up to respond to reality, plain common sense or the will of the people.
Even if McCormick defeats her Republican opponent, U.S. Sen. Mike Braun, R-Indiana, on Nov. 5, she still will confront an Indiana General Assembly that will be hostile both to her and to any notion of allowing women to control their own bodies and make their own reproductive choices.
The members of that legislature will have no incentive to work with McCormick or for women in the state. That’s because those lawmakers are products of a system designed to reward intransigence rather than rationality.
Indiana’s legislature is one of the most gerrymandered in the United States. Gerrymandering is the dark science of drawing legislative maps to favor one political party over the other.
It also is the reason Indiana, which generally votes 55% to 59% Republican in statewide elections, awards just under 75% of the seats in the General Assembly to the GOP. That overwhelming advantage in numbers—called a supermajority in legislative parlance—strips Democrats of even the rights and protections generally afforded minority and opposition parties.
Even worse, gerrymandering places in power people who have no interest in solving problems. Because the only genuine political threat facing them is a primary challenge, which inevitably comes from candidates even more radical than they are, the lawmakers sent forth from gerrymandered districts see no reason to compromise with or even listen to people who disagree with them. If they make the mistake of being reasonable, the tiny sliver of single-issue voters who tend to decide who wins a primary will send someone even more extreme in their place.
Nor would a Gov. McCormick have much muscle with which to confront this rigged system.
The Indiana governor’s office is one of the weakest—if not the weakest—in terms of constitutional powers in the United States.
The Hoosier governor’s veto, for example, can be overridden by the simple majority vote of the legislature.
A veto that weak is not a veto. It’s a polite, even meek request to please, pretty please, pretty please reconsider.
The fact is that Hoosier women concerned about reproductive rights—or all Hoosiers who care about making government truly representative of their views—won’t be able to do so until they take the work of drawing legislative maps out of politicians’ hands.
Until they end gerrymandering in the state.
Until then, Jennifer McCormick and anyone else who cares about restoring reproductive rights can propose all the measures they wish.
That’s OK.
Speaking one’s mind—giving voice to one’s displeasure—can be therapeutic.
No one, though, should be deceived into thinking that the hardliners in the Indiana General Assembly will consider listening.