Republicans say their restraint on the issue makes sense. A near-total abortion ban has been in place in Texas for eight months, and seemingly no political price has been paid so far.
State Representative Gene Wu, a Houston Democrat, said he worries that in Republican states that have been living with steadily rising restrictions on reproductive rights, the response to overturning Roe could be as muted as it has been in Texas, and that in Democratic states, voters will be reassured that their rights are safe.
“This has been done so incrementally, it’s like there’s a learned helplessness. We’ve taken so much abuse; what’s a little more?” he said, likening women in states like Texas to the frog in the boiling pot of water. “I hope that’s not the case.”
Another factor mitigating the backlash might be the rising popularity of long-term contraception, such as IUDs, and the increased access to birth control in general, which has helped lower the nation’s abortion rate in recent years and given more women a sense of reproductive security.
A decade-old study by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists found that the percentage of women in childbearing years using long-acting, reversible contraception had risen steadily, from 2.4 percent in 2002 to 8.5 percent in 2009 to 11.6 percent in 2012. The figure is about 12 percent now, said Dr. Nisha Verma, a fellow at the college and a gynecologist in Washington, D.C.
“The need for abortion will never go away,” Dr. Verma said, but, she added, “We’ve definitely seen that people have been able to take more control in their reproductive health.”
Another study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a 21.6 percent jump in the use of such contraception in the months after the 2016 election of Mr. Trump, with his vows to install justices who would overturn Roe.
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.