The abortion battles make interesting headlines, but I think these are merely skirmishes after the main battle has been fought and lost.
Conservatives can continue to nibble around the edges, but a watershed overturning of Roe v. Wade would only result in each state being free to make their own laws as to the legality of abortion. It wouldn't outlaw abortions.
All the blue states, and even a large portion of the red ones would probably keep abortion legal with varying restrictions. And that's the best case scenario.
We have a whole generation of women in child-bearing age that never knew a time when abortions were illegal. A great many of them have the attitude that "I'd never get an abortion, but I wouldn't want it to be illegal!"
So, I'm not quite as fired up about the issue as I used to be, because abortion is never going to be outlawed as a whole in the US. Not even close. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to nibble around the edges and try to make it is as rare as possible. That's a fight worth fighting.
Dear Dog Gone,
"Conservatives can continue to nibble around the edges, but a watershed overturning of Roe v. Wade would only result in each state being free to make their own laws as to the legality of abortion. It wouldn't outlaw abortions."
I agree that overturning Roe wouldn't directly outlaw any abortions.
I've often said here on Free Republic that overturning Roe would be merely the beginning of the fight against legalized abortion.
But we can't begin until Roe is gone.
"All the blue states, and even a large portion of the red ones would probably keep abortion legal with varying restrictions. And that's the best case scenario."
I've looked into this before, and something like 20 states would have laws go into effect that would severely restrict abortion. The number of legal abortions would begin to decline nearly immediately. And significantly. That's not too bad a start.
However, I look to the period immediately before Roe. In the late 1960s, the push was on in state after state to liberalize abortion laws. The pro-aborts won many victories - around 20 states significantly liberalized their abortion laws up until 1970. But then the pro-life folks started to get going. After 1970, about 30 states tried to modify their abortion laws, generally to liberalize them. The effort to liberalize abortion laws failed in each of the states after 1970 where it was attempted. Even New York's legislature REPEALED its liberal abortion law just two years after putting it in place. It was only Gov. Rockefeller's veto of the repeal that left it in place.
The pro-aborts went to the courts because it was turning out that in the long run, most folks didn't want abortion on demand.
Even now, even in the defeat in South Dakota, we can see what a lot of folks think. That law was a complete and total ban on abortion - no exceptions. And it still got in the mid-40%s. Wow! What would have happened if the ban had permitted exceptions for the life of the mother and for rape and incest? I bet it would have passed.
And I think that that general model would pass in a lot of states.
In the mid-term, I think that a lot of states would retain fairly liberal abortion laws, but I think in the long-term, the states with more restrictive abortion laws would demonstrate to folks in other states that restrictive abortion laws can work. And I think that what was happening in the period immediately prior to Roe - accelerating momentum in favor of protecting unborn children in law - would reoccur.
Even today, with Roe intact, majorities of folks would ban abortions generally, as long as the exceptions for life of the mother, rape, incest, and severe genetic deformity were left intact. These exceptions represent less than 4% of abortions. Although many, perhaps even most folks think that most abortions actually fall into these exception categories, the fact is that most folks, perhaps unwittingly, favor abortion laws that would make illegal approximately 96% of abortions.
In the meanwhile, in the mid-term where many states would retain liberal abortion laws, I think the incidence of abortion in the United States would be reduced significantly. Even before we got to the point where abortion would be generally illegal throughout the country, many millions of lives would be saved.
However, as long as Roe is in place, none of that can happen.
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