According to any reasonable theory of political science, any normal assumption about how power works in our Republic, this day should not have happened.
The anti-abortion movement spent half a century trying to overturn a Supreme Court decision that allegedly reflected the enlightened consensus of the modern era. This movement worked against the general trend of the population, which popularized “Roe v. Wade” itself, even as the country continued to be in conflict over the underlying issue; against the almost universal consensus of the media, academia and experts; against the wishes of politicians who nominally supported the cause, against the preferences of substantial portions of the American conservatism donor class.
Throughout all these years, the anti-abortion cause also swam against the sociological and religious currents of American life, which favored social progressivism and secularization. It found little overt support among Hollywood’s cultural producers and social justice crusaders, or the corporate entities that have recently embraced so many progressive causes. It was hampered by the concealment of the injustice it opposed, the lack of voice of the electorate on behalf of whom it tried to speak.
And it has worked against the weight of the American class hierarchy, as anti-abortion sentiment is strongest among the least educated and low-income Americans — exactly the wrong constituency to begin with, according to cynics and realists alike, if you intend to pressure the elite or change the world.
Furthermore, the anti-abortion movement had to succeed twice. It is entirely true that the Supreme Court’s decision is the work of a virtually accidental supermajority, created by the chance interplay between the mortality of the justices and the unlikely victory of Donald Trump.
But it is also true that the anti-abortion side already built an apparent majority in the high court in the standard way, in the Reagan era, supporting Republican presidents who won large popular majorities and appointed a series of judges whose philosophy was allegedly opposed to the progressive policies of the court presided over by Earl Warren. When three of those judges — Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor — voted to keep Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992, his decision was clearly intended to be a permanent settlement, a call to end “a national controversy” with “a common order rooted in the Constitution.” The anti-abortion movement was always a marginal and troubled cause, and at that moment it seemed defeated.
However, 30 years later, here we are. And for all the contingency involved, future scholars of mass movements will find in the anti-abortion cause a remarkable example of activism sustained against substantial odds, of popular mobilization defying elite consensus – of “democratic virtues,” to borrow the scientist’s term. politician Jon Shields, who would have been more widely studied had they not been exerted in a cause contrary to progressives and the left.
But the story does not end here. While the anti-abortion movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has yet to prove that it can do so in a way that can garner lasting majority support.
Your weaknesses will not disappear in victory. His enemies were radicalized by his judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyper-individualist, others hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.
The anti-abortion movement is inevitably linked to some kind of conservatism, as it is difficult to separate an anti-abortion ethic from a conservative one around sex, monogamy and marriage. But among its own authors and activists the movement understood that it also carried the best of the American tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.
At the same time, many critics of the anti-abortion movement see it as not only conservative, but an incarnation of reaction in its worst sense – punitive, cruel and patriarchal, burdening poor women and doing nothing to alleviate them, putting the life of the unborn child. ahead of women’s lives and health, while pretending to consider them equal.
To win the battle in the long run, to persuade the vast and restless middle of the country, opponents of abortion need role models that prove this criticism wrong. They need to show how restrictions on abortion are compatible with the goods that abortion advocates accuse them of compromising — the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when unexpected or in the midst of great hardship.
These problems may be secondary to the life-and-death issue of abortion itself, but they are essential to the holistic aspects of political and ideological debate. In any great controversy, people are swayed one way or the other not only by the correctness of a particular position, but by the fact that that position is embedded in a social vision that seems generally attractive, desirable, worthwhile. ally and fight for it.
Some of the pathologies of right-wing governance may pave the way for the anti-abortion movement to fail. Can you imagine a future where anti-abortion laws are always tied to a punitive and petty policy, where struggling women may face police scrutiny for a suspected abortion but receive little in the way of prenatal guidance or postpartum support? Christmas.
In such a world, serious restrictions on abortion would be sustainable in the more conservative parts of the country, but probably nowhere else, and the long-term prospects for national abortion rights legislation would be bright. But there are other possible futures. The anti-abortion push could control and improve conservative governance, rather than be undermined by it, making the GOP more serious about family policy and public health. Well-governed conservative states like Utah could shape new approaches to family politics; states in the far south could be spurred on to a more generous policy by anti-abortion activists; large republican states like Texas could remain magnets for internal migration, even with restrictive abortion laws.
And it’s not just the anti-abortion movement that can alienate the conflicted milieu in the post-Roe world. The pro-abortion side is today at risk of abandoning its time-tested rhetorical moves in the name of progressive political correctness and refusing to compromise its maximalist political demands.
Furthermore, certain strongholds of contemporary progressivism have a darker spirit than the youthful atmosphere of the 1960s progressivism, in which the pro-abortion movement won so many victories.
If Alabama and Mississippi are not the best advertisements for the anti-abortion vision, neither are Seattle and San Francisco necessarily brilliant advertisements for where uncut social progressivism will lead. All of which is to say that any confident prediction about the consequences of this decision is probably foolish. There can be no certainty about the future of abortion policy because for nearly 50 years all political debates have been overshadowed by judicial controversies, and only now are we about to find out what the dispute really is.
It’s just the end of the beginning; the real end, in any agreement or victory, lies ahead.
