One of the oddest pieces of U.S. history is that we passed a constitutional amendment to ban the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” and then a mere fourteen years later passed another amendment to repeal that amendment. Considering how impossibly hard it is to amend the Constitution, it is amazing that we were able to pass Prohibition. But it seems to me to be even more remarkable that less than a decade and a half later we were able to convince two-thirds of both houses of Congress and the legislatures of three-fourths of all our states to admit their mistake and correct it. It’s almost as if our country went mad in 1919 and then somehow came to its senses in 1933. I guess a World War and a Great Depression can do that to a people, but it’s not something I can envision happening today.
One area where I can see something kind of similar happening is abortion. We’ll never be able to pass an amendment on abortion policy. I don’t think we can even pass a law on abortion unless we do away with the filibuster. But the Supreme Court could overturn Roe, leading to a burst of restrictive legislation throughout the country. And, then, maybe fifteen years later a new consensus might emerge that restricting abortion is a profoundly bad idea. Who knows? It could happen.
What I do know is that Roe has really poisoned our political environment and our judicial system. In a sane world, most people would acknowledge that they have no expertise in Constitutional Law and would merely look to see judges appointed who have good moral character. But we want judges who will vote for the political point of view that we support. We want politicians who will only nominate judges who share our views on reproductive rights. That’s a messed up system. We really don’t look at judges as different from politicians.
I don’t have a solution to this problem, and I think the Court did what it had to do on choice as well as desegregation when faced with a Congress that was incapable of action. But somehow we have to unwind this polarization that has conflated our legislative and judicial branches. We may be condemned to suffer a period of madness to get to a place where we can come to a sane solution. All I know is that the status quo is not good. I’m tired of feeling like our rights are only as protected as our ability to win elections.
What brought this up? This will never go away. This is the Catholic Church’s # 1 hobby horse. Why do you think they support the GOP like they do. They’ve thrown away their social justice mission because of this issue.
that’s kind of true. I hadn’t thought about it that way.
Interesting speculation. I have wondered what would happen if suddenly abortion were made illegal, rather than just very difficult to obtain as it is today. I’ve been in other countries where abortion was illegal (West Germany, Ireland), but in those cases pregnant women could travel easily to nearby countries for abortions, so the political pressure against the laws was mitigated. Since most Americans (something like 85%) don’t even have passports, the impact would be much greater here.
I also speculate that the only reason the SCOTUS majority has not completely overturned Roe is because this issue is absolutely key to keeping the GOP base intact. Take it away and they run the risk of losing a large part of their base.
An exaggeration? No, not really. Spend some time talking to a die hard GOPer and it won’t be long before abortion is mentioned. Unlike other issues abortion plays a key role in opinion-forming in that it serves as kind of an inoculation against any arguments that the Democrats might be right on anything. Point, out, for example, that Democratic policy would save lives of children due to better prenatal and early life health care and the GOPer responds that this is trumped by the 13 million or so abortions every year. But much beyond that, the idea that one party is advocating the death of 13 million people per year (which is how the GOPers are taught to view the issue) and that party becomes so evil that a GOPers can’t even consider anything else. It colors their whole perception — if Democrats think the globe is warming then it must be cooling, because Democrats are so evil. Etc.
Of course, the reason for this thinking is that no one actually discusses abortion circumstances any more. In 1973 the dominant narrative was of the pregnant woman put into an impossible situation, forced into a back-alley abortion, and all the problems and horrors as a result of that. By 2010 that narrative is but a ghost. Now the dominant narrative is “partial birth abortion”. The pro-life framers have really creamed the pro-choicers in this debate. Very few pro-lifers think about the fact that the fetus being aborted is extremely tiny — most are imagining 13 million full-term babies being killed. Virtually no pro-lifers realize that the 3rd-term abortions are an extremely tiny percentage of the whole, and they are performed only under extreme medical duress in situations that are devastating to the parents of the fetuses. They imagine that abortions are performed on evil sluts who don’t care … period.
So, yes, it does make some sense that if abortion were to be made illegal the situation might turnaround as the old narratives about back-alley abortions were restored. But I’m not hopeful given how powerful the military-industria-media-complex is at keeping the rightwing base intact.
Good point — I would also add that the issue of gay rights is already having a similar effect on republican party solidarity. Take abortion completely out of the equation and I think the whole party would splinter in a relatively short period of time.
On Prohibition. Prohibition was a blunt tool that the women’s movement and early Progressive “good goverrnment” reformers used to deal with (1) drunken spouse abuse and (2) rampant political corruption orchestrated at meeting that women could not attend because they were held at bars and saloons. Once woman’s suffrage was passed and “good government” reform was part of the political culture, it was no longer as useful. And in the meantime, folks found that Prohibition didn’t lead to less corruption but to more and to major gang wars that endangered people. In the first case, it was not a tough sell to the religious. In the second, it was not a tough sell to folks within urban areas; the rural religious fought a rearguard movement that still has some dry counties left. It was a repeal that left a local option.
On abortion laws. “And, then, maybe fifteen years later a new consensus might emerge that restricting abortion is a profoundly bad idea. Who knows? It could happen. “
That consensus happened in the 1970s because studies were showing that even with strong and strongly enforced abortion laws there were still millions of backstreet and self-induced abortions occurring in the US. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade was reflective of that consensus. Also, the Catholic Church was much different then. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council were still very much in place, but there was a lot of grassroots grumbling that first sought the abandonment of Latin as an issue but shortly after Roe v. Wade sought abortion as an issue to regain doctrinal power in the church and most especially in local parishes and to build a political movement for overturning Roe v. Wade. It took three years after the decision for all this to percolate into a popular movement (1976) and another three years for that popular movement to be captured by the Republican Party in the grand unification of the Religious Right that elected Ronald Reagan and slapped down Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter.
What will cause that consensus to re-emerge is exactly the success of the abortion movement in making abortion illegal again. And when they discover hundreds of thousands of women needlessly dying because the law did not deter them and still the numbers of abortions are relatively unchanged, sanity might once again return.
But one thing that holding the issue in being now is the large number of men who have found it a convenient way to make money. Entrepreneurs like the men at the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and all the other anti-abortion organizations will be loathe to lose their market among the faithful. If change does occur, those groups will wither away at about the same rate as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which as far as I know still exists and still keeps its headquarters town of Evanston, IL a dry town.