In the dozen years since Cory Booker arrived in the Senate, the landscape of reproductive rights in America has been scorched earth, reduced to a patchwork of inaccessible care and constitutional chaos.
Through this period of historic collapse, Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who is actively campaigning for the 2028 presidential nomination even before he is renominated for another six-year Senate term, has stood as a monument not to resistance, but to resonant failure.
His record is a masterclass in how passion, when meticulously curated, can produce a profound lack of protection for the people it promises to serve.
Booker entered the Senate in 2013 as a charismatic champion of progress, his oratory often compared to polished stone despite a record of privatizing public schools, unleashing police brutality, and defending vulture capitalism.
Yet on the defining issue of bodily autonomy, that oratory has consistently crumbled against the harder stone of political reality.
He has voted correctly, aligning with his party against restrictive judicial nominees and for legislative codifications of abortion access. But voting is the bare minimum of political theater, and the play has been a tragedy.
While Booker delivered stirring speeches on the Senate floor, the anti-abortion movement was meticulously and ruthlessly building the architecture of reversal in the states and the courts.
Booker has a 100% rating from reproductive freedom advocacy groups, including Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America), for his voting record in Congress, but he has consistently batted zero when it came to protecting abortion access
His signature failure is not one of intent, but of impact.
In 2022, as the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization loomed, Booker joined colleagues in a doomed push for the Women’s Health Protection Act.
Abortion is banned entirely in 13 U.S. states, with 6 additional states implementing early gestational limits (6–12 weeks), often with very narrow exceptions for life-threatening emergencies.
The effort was less a last stand than a staged performance, foreordained by the Senate’s filibuster rules, which Booker has repeatedly declined to challenge in any meaningful, sustained way.
He has, at times, expressed openness to filibuster reform, but his energy has never been the catalyst for change.
Instead, he has settled for the comfortable martyrdom of the principled loser, his hands clean of the messy fight to actually alter the rules that enabled the loss.
This is the consistent pattern: bold talk in a closed room, followed by public acquiescence to the very systems that guarantee defeat. He is a firefighter who eloquently describes the heat of the flames but never wields the axe to break down the door.
While activists in state capitals faced down riotous crowds and legal harassment, and while providers in conservative states risked everything to offer care, Booker’s contribution has largely been a symphony of concern.
The dissonance between his urgent tone and his procedural passivity is the soundtrack to a retreat that marks a complete and utter failure.
The consequences are measured in miles traveled by desperate women and in the cold silence of shuttered clinics. They are measured in the confounding labyrinth of state laws that now forbid women from exercising a fundamental right.
Judging by the swelling coffers of his political campaign fund, failure has not hurt Booker.
Booker represents a state where abortion access remains protected, allowing him the luxury of fighting a theoretical war while his constituents are largely insulated from the actual casualties.
This geographic and political distance has fostered a record long on empathy and tragically short on the bare-knuckled, bold, and rule-bending political engineering the moment demanded.
In the end, a senator’s legacy is written not in their words but in the tangible security of the people they represent. By that metric, the American people—particularly the millions now living under near-total bans—are less secure than when Booker began his tenure.
A 2025 study revealed that, along with higher maternal risks, states with bans saw a rise in infant mortality, because care for fatal congenital anomalies was restricted by those laws.
Booker has been a spectator to a demolition, providing a stirring narration as the walls came down. The record shows a man who saw the flood coming, gave excellent speeches about the importance of swimming, but never managed to build a levee that could hold.
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