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 Even New York's legislature REPEALED its liberal abortion law just two years after putting it in place.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.
sitetest
I think your post is quite correct in most respects.
The only thing I'm skeptical of is whether the overall numbers of abortions would be significantly reduced if the question were returned to the states.
There are states right now without any significant number of abortion clinics. If I'm not mistaken, either Mississippi or Alabama only has one in the entire state.
As long as Southwest Airlines has cheap Funfares, getting an abortion even if you live in a highly restricted state is not going to be too much of a challenge. There will be a number of states that will retain abortion on demand and it might take several generations of incremental progress to have a hope of changing that.
I think when Roe is overturned you'll see the R's driven further into minority status, for a generation. The sheeple, educated in public schools, will be told that the big bad Republicans have taken away a "fundamental right". That it is the work of "right wing judges". That we are in danger of becoming like Iran, a theocracy. That the men who voted "hate women". It will make the out-of-Iraq 7x24 all-network telethon seem like a commerical break. And it will succeed.