With Roe vs. Wade overturned, anti-choice forces will likely be emboldened to push for draconian abortion laws, writes columnist Ross Douthat.
Anti-abortion demonstrators outside the U.S. Supreme Court on the day it overturned its Roe vs. Wade ruling that protected abortion rights, in Washington, June 24, 2022. “While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion,” writes The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, “it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory.
And it worked against the weight of the American class hierarchy, since anti-abortion sentiment is stronger among less-educated and lower-income Americans — exactly the wrong constituency to start with, according to cynics and realists alike, if you want to pressure the elite or change the world. When three of those justices, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor, voted to effectively uphold Roe in 1992′s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, their decision clearly aspired to be a permanent settlement, a call to end “a national controversy” with “a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” The anti-abortion movement was an always-marginal and embattled cause, and in that moment it did seem defeated.
The anti-abortion movement is inevitably bound to some kind of conservatism, insofar as an anti-abortion ethic is hard to separate from a conservative ethic around sex, monogamy and marriage. But among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.
To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, opponents of abortion need models that prove this critique wrong. They need to show how abortion restrictions 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 it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.
But there are other possible futures. The anti-abortion impulse could control and improve conservative governance rather than being undermined by it, making the GOP more serious about family policy and public health.
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