Could NC enact more abortion restrictions in 2025?

Republicans no longer have a supermajority in the NC House, but will they still be able to push through a more severe ban next year? Will they even want to? The answer is complicated. 

During his successful campaign for governor this year, Josh Stein promised to veto any further restrictions on reproductive rights that the Republican-controlled General Assembly might pass. But to hold that veto power again, he warned, voters needed to focus on more names on the ballot than his.

“If you care about reproductive freedom,” Stein told Cardinal and Pine from his front porch in August, “it’s necessary that you elect me as governor, but it’s equally necessary that we break the supermajority in either the House, or the Senate, or both.”

Message mostly received. 

Republicans held on to their supermajority in the state Senate, but they lost it in the House by a single seat. 

So does that mean that North Carolina is safe from any new restrictions on abortion care or IVF in 2025? 

Maybe. Maybe not. 

That’s not a reassuring answer for reproductive care advocates, but the realities of the immediate future of abortion care in North Carolina are complex.

Republicans wrote the 12-week abortion ban behind closed doors and introduced the 47-page bill with little notice, giving Democrats and the public only a couple of days to read it. The supermajority is what allowed them to do all that, with little care for the minority party or the governor’s veto.

So they may not be able to do things so baldly in 2025, but the margins are thin, the defense fragile. 

Many Republicans, including Senate leader Phil Berger, have publicly distanced themselves from any new abortion restrictions, but many in the party have said they want a bill that bans abortion at conception. And all they need is a single Democrat to vote with them, or even just miss a veto override vote, and the supermajority temporarily returns. 

So here is a quick look at what North Carolinians can expect in the statewide fight for abortion care and reproductive rights in 2025.

‘A lot of our deepest fears have come true.’

First, let’s review why any story about abortion care should be focused more on health than politics. 

“Women are 14 times more likely to die from childbirth than from an abortion in the first trimester,” Dr. Erica Pettigrew, a family medicine doctor, told Cardinal & Pine last year. 

Nearly every major medical society in the world sees abortion bans as dangerous meddling in fundamental healthcare. More than 1,400 medical professionals in North Carolina wrote an open letter to lawmakers in 2023, urging them to listen to doctors and leave the state’s previous laws, which then allowed abortion up to 20 weeks, in place.

In several interviews with Cardinal & Pine last spring, doctors laid out the ban’s impact in North Carolina, describing a new landscape of delays, backlogs, and hesitancy that forces doctors to consult lawyers before saving patients’ lives.

“A lot of our deepest fears have come true,” Dr. Robin Wallace, a family medicine doctor and abortion provider in the Triangle, said in a phone interview last week.

She cited widely reported stories in Texas and Georgia of women who died after being denied care while having miscarriages. North Carolina has exceptions for the life of the mother, but Wallace and other North Carolina doctors warn that the exceptions are so vague they can cause delays and hesitation in hospitals that can be dangerous.

“It was not hyperbole,” Wallace said of doctors’ warnings. 

“We were speaking from an informed place of knowing what legal restrictions on evidence-based medicine would do, and it’s created chaos and it’s created a public health crisis.”

Hints of any new restrictions could come early

It’s certain that some Republicans in both chambers are eager to ban abortion care outright. Several House members introduced a full ban weeks before the 12-week ban was moved into the light. The full ban went nowhere, but it served as the thrust of the narrative pushed by the full party that a 12-week ban served as a compromise. 

Whether new restrictions might be coming could have more to do with Republican in-fighting than with Democrats, NC Sen. Graig Meyer, a Democrat who represents parts of Caswell, Orange, and Person counties, told Cardinal & Pine in a phone interview last week.

“I think the bigger thing that will determine whether they take another run at abortion restrictions will be internal Republican politics,” Meyer said.

“They always have members that want to continue to reduce abortion access until they get down to zero. But they also have members who don’t, either for personal or political reasons, so whatever abortion bill ends up in front of us is almost always the result of some trade offs on other policy issues,” he said.

With House speaker Tim Moore now off to Congress, that means that Senate Pro Temp Phil Berger, now arguably the most powerful Republican in the state,  is the one to watch.

“Phil Berger tends to be pretty clear on what he’s gonna do and what he’s not gonna do,” Meyer said. “I think it’s worth listening to Berger’s speeches on the opening day of session, because it’s usually pretty clear in laying out what the legislative agenda is going to be.”

Some Republicans don’t appear eager to wade back into the abortion fray.

“I completely expect somebody, some Republican in the General Assembly next year, will file a conception bill, and/or six-week bill,” Republican Sen. Amy Galey told the News and Observer last August.  “But I would be surprised if that bill found any real traction.”

In the same article, Berger expressed a similar view.

“I personally would not be in favor of making any changes next year,” he said, noting that much depended on what happened in the governor and legislative races.

“We’ll just see what happens,” he said. 

‘This is actually beyond Democrats’

To maintain the broken supermajority, Democrats have to stay united — 100% united. If even one Democrat votes with Republicans on any veto override of another abortion bill, the bill will pass.

Democrats are confident, though, that while they may splinter on some issues, they are consistently aligned on reproductive rights.

“I never assume that it will cut straight party lines,” Rep. Maria Cervania, a Wake County Democrat told Cardinal & Pine last week, but “I am fairly confident my caucus is in support of reproductive health care and having experts and medical professionals be the trusted source in what we really need to do with their patients.”

Still, she said, Democrats need to be “resilient … and prepared.”

To start, they can learn lessons in 2025 from the fight over SB 20 two years ago, Cervania said. 

One, they need to read the bills closely, even the ones, like SB 20, that are nearly 50 pages long, because many of the biggest thorns are often hidden amid boilerplate language.

But more importantly, they should engage their constituents more in the process, even if a dangerous bill is introduced with little notice or even if it’s dozens of pages long, Cervania said. 

“We can have our consistent constituents help us with this, and let us know what are the most concerning things for them,” she said. 

“Then afterwards, we know how these votes are going to be, even with the supermajority broken, so we need to fundraise off this. We need to protest on this. We need to social media blast on this.” 

The party response should not just be aimed at Democrats, either, she said.

“This is actually beyond Democrats,” Cervania said. “Unaffiliated people in North Carolina and even some Republicans have expressed that [the effort to restrict reproductive care] is not right, and [the inability] to get our people involved in the process [last time] … was a lost opportunity that we could really use in this next go around if it comes.”

Woodson Bradley, who will be starting her first term in the NC Senate in January after her victory in November, said in an interview that she expected the issue to be one of the most important she’ll face as a legislator. 

And despite what party leaders say publicly, she expects Republicans to push for more restrictions.

“I have very real concerns about that,” she said. “I do not put anything past this majority of dialing things back further and wrapping them in a package that makes for a good soundbite, but is very draconian.”

The risks of a fragile line of defense

Robert Reives, the House minority leader, has been in the legislature for a decade, and served as leader since 2020. His first term as leader was “the most productive two years we had,” Reives said in an interview after the election, because Democrats held a “comfortable minority,” and Republicans had to engage with them.

“We had to talk to each other,” Reives said. “And that’s not about Democratic ideas, it’s not about Republican ideas, it’s about the fact that we need to talk to each other to come up with the best legislation.”

Under a supermajority, that’s not the case. The party in charge can pass anything it wants, as long as legislators fall in line. And Republican legislators almost always fall in line.

“When one of us has a supermajority, we’re left to our worst devices. Because what happens is you keep moving your legislation further and further to whatever side that is,” Reives said.

Some of the most controversial bills Republicans passed the last two years came from  the far right of the party and were introduced with no discussion or warning, and with little time allotted for review before a vote was held. 

These efforts include the abortion ban, several efforts to make voting harder, and many attempts to take power from the governor, like SB 382, the “power grab” bill passed this month and the final vote held under the supermajority. 

Republicans passed these bills overwhelmingly, Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed each of them, and every single Republican voted to override the vetoes.

Now that the supermajority is broken – however fragile the break might be – Reives is hopeful the dialogue will return.

Republican leadership, however, has expressed confidence that they could still drive the legislation they want in 2025, in part, because a supermajority is based not on the make up of the full legislature but on whoever is voting on a given day, so if a single Democrat misses a veto override vote, and all Republicans are there, the supermajority returns for that vote.

Like Cervania, Meyer is optimistic, however, that the party can unite on reproductive rights. 

“There are a few issues where all Democrats will hold firm and I do think that reproductive rights is one of them.”

But then again, there’s the Tricia Cothams of the world.

Another defection would restore the supermajority

Memories are long about Rep. Tricia Cotham, the representative from Mecklenburg County who won her race as a Democrat in 2022 and switched parties a couple of months later because, she said, Democrats treated her unfairly. 

As a candidate in the fall of 2022, she vowed to protect abortion rights. As a Republican the following spring, she voted for the 12-week ban.

And now, another Democrat, Cecil Brockman of Guilford County, is publicly complaining about criticism from Democrats. 

Brockman has consistently supported abortion rights and voted against the 12-week ban, but when he faced criticism for missing the veto override of SB382 this month because of health reasons, he issued a thinly veiled warning that could suggest that breaking the supermajority wasn’t enough to protect reproductive rights.

“I would just say that this is the exact same behavior that pushed Tricia Cotham out of our party,” Brockman told the News & Observer. 

“Everyone has their limits.”