The end of Roe v. Wade is just the beginning
By any reasonable political science theory, any normal supposition about how power works in our republic, this day should not have come.
The anti-abortion movement has spent half a century trying to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that was presumed to reflect the enlightened consensus of the modern age. It has worked against the public’s status quo bias, which made Roe v. Wade itself popular, even if the country remained conflicted about the underlying issue. Against the near-universal consensus of the media, academic and expert class. Against the desires of politicians who were nominally supportive of its cause, the preferences of substantial portions of American conservatism’s donor class.
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.
More, the anti-abortion movement has had to succeed twice. It’s entirely true that the Supreme Court
decision overturning Roe v. Wade is the work of a somewhat accidental supermajority, created by the haphazard interaction between judicial mortality and Donald Trump’s unlikely victory.
But it’s also true that the anti-abortion side already built an apparent high court majority the standard way, in the Reagan era, by supporting GOP presidents who appointed justices whose philosophy was opposed to the liberal policymaking of the Warren court.
When three justices, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor, upheld Roe in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, their decision 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.
But the story doesn’t end here. While the anti-abortion movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it hasn’t yet proven it can do so that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses won’t disappear in victory. Its foes have been radicalized by its judicial success.
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 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.
At the same time the anti-abortion movement’s critics regard it not as conservative but as an embodiment of reaction at its worst — cruel and patriarchal, piling burdens on poor women and doing nothing to relieve them, putting unborn life ahead of the health of women while pretending to hold them equal.
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.
There can be no certainty about the future of abortion politics because all debates have been overshadowed by judicial controversy, and only now are we about to find out what the contest really looks like. It’s merely the end of the beginning; the true end, in whatever settlement or victory, lies ahead.