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These Republican lawmakers challenged abortion bans.Then they faced backlash..At least four of them lost reelection bids after anti-abortion groups and key party allies backed their challengers instead.Two others — a state representative from North Dakota and a state senator from Tennessee — face contested primaries.By Cassandra Jaramillo for ProPublica If Eric Murphy loses his primary election on June 9, he believes he already knows one reason why.Last year, the North Dakota state representative, a Republican, tried to expand the window of pregnancy in which women could access abortion.The state legislature had banned it for almost everyone from the moment of conception.Tied up in court, the ban hadn’t yet gone into effect.But Murphy wanted to lock in a less restrictive law, making abortion accessible up to 15 weeks and even later for women whose doctors deemed it a medical necessity.To convince his fellow legislators, he read out loud from two ProPublica stories about women in Texas who died without lifesaving care.“Physicians felt compelled to follow the law,” he said in a hearing, “and both women died so that an inane law could be followed.” A conservative colleague had warned him not to file the bill, Murphy told ProPublica, recalling the man’s words: “I can no longer protect you from who’s going to come after you.” There was some truth to that sentiment.At least four Republican state lawmakers who challenged severe abortion restrictions lost support from anti-abortion groups and key party allies and went on to lose primary elections, ProPublica found.The blueprint in those races was remarkably similar.Opponents either embraced stricter abortion policies or avoided the issue altogether.Anti-abortion organizations campaigned against the incumbents, party endorsements shifted to their opponents and activists worked to turn out voters in low-participation primary elections.In some of the races ProPublica examined, lawmakers who replaced abortion-ban reformers went on to support even stricter abortion legislation.In South Carolina, for instance, two new senators supported a bill to eliminate almost all exceptions to the state’s abortion ban.One provision of the bill would send women convicted of illegally terminating their pregnancies to jail.Murphy is one of at least two Republican state lawmakers now facing a contested primary after trying to modify their states’ abortion restrictions.Richard Briggs, a state senator from Tennessee, is also fighting to keep his seat.In 2019, Briggs voted for the state’s so-called trigger law — a ban that would snap into place if the federal right to abortion was ever overturned.But he had second thoughts after that actually happened.A cardiothoracic surgeon, Briggs realized the newly activated law didn’t provide adequate protections for patients having medical complications.“As a medical doctor, I drew the line,” he said in an interview.He introduced bills for a clearer medical exception and protection for doctors who intervened in cases where a fatal fetal anomaly risked the mother’s health.The latter bill failed and now serves as ammunition for the challenger vying for his seat in the state’s Aug.6 primary.“My opponent consistently works to weaken Tennessee’s pro life laws,” Kent Morrell says on his campaign website, noting that Tennessee Right to Life had revoked its endorsement of Briggs.Murphy, who teaches biomedical sciences at the University of North Dakota’s medical school, ultimately did not succeed at reforming the state’s ban.His bill failed 87-6, and the state Supreme Court later reinstated the original ban, which forbids abortion from conception, with exceptions for rape and incest up to six weeks and to save the life of the mother.The first time Murphy ran for election, his county’s Republican Party had endorsed him.Not this time.Instead, the party endorsed his two challengers, including Jill Chandler, the executive director of a “crisis pregnancy center” who believes abortion should be banned from conception.She told ProPublica she happened to be present in the committee room when Murphy made the case for his bill.“To know that he was an endorsed Republican candidate from my district and one that I had voted for because of that endorsement was eye-opening,” she said.“I remember thinking, ‘This can never happen again.’” It was not the first time either Briggs or Murphy had taken positions that aggravated members of their parties in legislatures that have taken sharp turns to the right.Murphy voted against book bans and private school vouchers.Briggs had urged the public to get COVID-19 shots and has said that medical expertise should trump politics in decisions that involve public health.Briggs expressed confidence in his election chances; he feels that voters agree with the decisions he’s made and noted that his Republican colleague, Sen.Becky Duncan Massey, survived a primary challenge over her support for abortion-ban exceptions.Murphy believes the “silent majority” supports the intent of his abortion bill, but primary races historically have low turnout.It could come down to a handful of votes, he said.“I might lose an election over this,” Murphy said, “but would I rather win an election by not doing the right thing?” The Fallen Reformers Mary DuBuisson, a former state Republican representative in a suburb outside of New Orleans, considers herself passionately “pro-life.” Like Briggs, she voted for her state’s near-total abortion ban in 2019.Three years later, just before Louisiana’s trigger law was implemented, it came before the legislature again.Recognizing that women would now have to live under the restriction, DuBuisson wanted to make sure victims of rape and incest could terminate their pregnancies.When her colleagues refused to include those exceptions, she became the only Republican to vote against the ban.A year later, she caused a stir when she sponsored a bill that would have allowed women whose pregnancies were not viable to end them.“To force a woman to carry to term with zero chance of survival is heartless and cruel,” she said at the time.She didn’t feel it would be controversial.Other Republican women in the House told her she was doing the right thing.But when it was time to vote, another female Republican state lawmaker made a motion that ultimately succeeded at killing the bill in committee.“I mean, I just couldn’t understand,” she said of all her colleagues.“What if this was you, your daughter or granddaughter?” When she came up for reelection, her primary opponent latched onto her record.Brian Glorioso was an attorney she had handily defeated in 2018.He called her proposed legislation a leftist attempt to circumvent the state’s abortion ban and said any “pro-abortion” doctor would falsely deem a pregnancy nonviable in records just to perform the procedure.She beat him in the Oct.14, 2023, primary by 384 votes — not enough to avoid a runoff.Then, he got some extra support.16, Louisiana Right to Life told its followers this runoff was key.Glorioso was expected to have a 100% “pro-life” voting record, while DuBuisson’s was 77%.27, the state’s new governor-elect, Republican Jeff Landry, endorsed him, citing issues other than abortion; he wouldn’t tell ProPublica whether DuBuisson’s record on it played a role.But Landry, who had defended the state’s ban as attorney general, made clear during his campaign that he was “an unwavering defender of life, especially in the face of adversity,” citing his 100% rating from a national anti-abortion group.“I think it partially cost me my election,” DuBuisson said of her attempts to reform the ban.History repeated itself the following year, this time in South Carolina.Three state senators — all Republicans who consider themselves “pro-life” — worked across party lines to defeat an abortion bill that essentially banned the procedure from conception and eliminated rape and incest exceptions.At the time, the state allowed abortion up to 20 wee