State legislatures divided over hot-button issues

The United States Congress will be officially divided with a Republican-controlled House and a Democratic-run Senate next month. The division means that the parties will have little common ground on which to agree on, especially on gun rights and abortion.

Congress approved a gun control bill in June, the most significant firearms legislation in nearly 30 years. It received bipartisan support from 14 Republicans in the House and 15 Republicans in the Senate. Analysts attributed the unusual Republican support to the outrage caused by mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

With the House in Republican control, the likelihood of President Joe Biden getting further gun control legislation from Congress is unlikely. Gun control will rest on the state level, and so will abortion.

Battles over new abortion restrictions or protections will kick into high gear next year — the first time many state lawmakers will be faced with such decisions as the notion of a post-Roe world no longer being hypothetical.

"There is definitely going to be a lot of action in the states," said Carrie Severino, president of the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Crisis Network that has helped elevate Republican judges. "The challenge is which states are going to have state courts that are likely to be well to the left of the people."

Ryan Stitzlein, senior national political director for abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, said: "People are paying attention to realize who their governor is, who their attorney general is, who is running their state legislature, which is so critical to the ability to access reproductive care and abortion."

But in many states abortion's new battleground is not level because of years of Republican efforts to gerrymander state legislatures, while Democrats largely focused on federal politics.

Surveys show that people in the US support abortion. Without the federal right to abortion under the constitutional right of Roe v Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned in June, about half the states are expected to ban abortion in the future.

With near-total bans on abortion already in place in more than a dozen states, abortion rights groups plan to focus on state legislatures where Republicans continue to push for restrictions. Some states will pass new laws or try new ways to block abortions.

Many anti-abortion advocates are now focusing on the growing availability of illegal abortion pills, fearing it has undercut their victory in the high court.

In Texas, where medical abortions are already banned, state Republican lawmakers are preparing to introduce legislation that would require internet providers to block abortion pill websites in the same way they can censor child pornography.

The largest anti-abortion organization in the state, Students for Life of America, has created a team assigned to investigate citizens who may be distributing abortion pills illegally.

It is making plans to systematically test the water in several cities, searching for contaminants they say result from medication abortion.