Why the fight on abortion will ease

Although many participants in it do not recognize this, and some who do recognize it regret it, the intensity of the debate about abortion policy is waning. This is partly because in 2022 the Supreme Court temporarily intensified the debate. And partly because the debate has been modulated by medical technology that has given the abstract debate the concreteness of visual vividness.

The Supreme Court’s initially divisive decision overturning its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling has catalyzed a consensus, albeit nationally uneven and slowly emerging. The consensus is as blurry as the improved sonogram images that perhaps are helping to catalyze it are sharp: By 15 weeks, it is untenable to talk, as some abortion-rights supporters do, about what is pictured by the sonogram as “fetal material.” It looks like a baby.

Robert Nisbet, a philosophically sophisticated sociologist who provided intellectual ballast to conservatism in the second half of the 20th century, considered it incoherent for conservatives to make opposition to abortion a fundamental tenet of their doctrine. He said “the major theme of Western conservatism” is “the preservation, to the extent feasible, of the autonomy of social groups against the state.” And particularly the preservation of “the family’s authority over its own.”

Abortion has been considered an intractably divisive issue because it supposedly was not amenable to the basic business of politics: the splitting of differences. Nisbet noted, however, that “there is no record of any religion, including Christianity, ever pronouncing an accidental miscarriage as a death to be commemorated in prayer and ritual.” This, Nisbet implied, indicates an ancient, durable and widespread cultural tendency to say this: Societies that assert an interest in protecting life before birth are not required, by custom or a settled, articulated logic, to ban all deliberate terminations of pregnancies.

This month, the Supreme Court of the nation’s third-most-populous state allowed the Legislature’s recently enacted six-week ban on abortion to go into effect next month. (Before this, Florida had a moderately permissive abortion law.) But the court also, and perhaps more importantly, approved a ballot initiative that this November might undo what the Legislature has done: If the initiative garners 60% support (current polling shows more than 60% support), it would establish a state constitutional right to abortion up to the point of viability (currently understood as 23-24 weeks).

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who calls himself pro-life, has said he would sign legislation restricting abortion to the first 15 weeks. Another Republican governor, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu, supports abortion rights, and accepts his state’s 24-week (viability) limit, and especially with each state working out its consensus. At six weeks, many pregnant women do not know their condition; recently, more than 90% of U.S. abortions have occurred within the first 15 weeks of gestation.

If most Republicans would reject a six-week threshold, and eschew an unconservative clamor for re-federalizing the subject with a national abortion ban, the taint of extremism would shift to Democrats.

The debate the U.S. Supreme Court fueled is being ameliorative. North Dakota and South Carolina will differ about abortion, but probably not forever as much they do now.