Ron Brownstein on the consequences of the upcoming Supreme Court abortion rights decision:
One of the original culture war conflicts may be poised for a resurgence — with potentially explosive political consequences. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to consider the legality of Mississippi’s restrictive law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy could trigger the most serious and sustained political debate over the procedure since the final decades of the 20th century. And that could dramatically widen the already gaping demographic and geographic fissures between red and blue America.
Public opinion over abortion today is much more polarized along party lines than it was in the first decades after the Supreme Court established a nationwide right to it in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Reflecting those divisions, red and blue states are poised to hurtle in radically different directions if the court grants them more leeway to regulate abortion by retrenching, or even reversing, the Roe decision through its ruling in the Mississippi case.
The battle over abortion that erupted in the 1970s helped trigger a decades-long political realignment that has re-sorted the two parties’ coalitions more along lines of cultural attitudes than class interests. But since the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Roe ruling in 1992 in another landmark decision, that debate has been largely abstract and distant, with relatively few Americans seriously believing that the right to abortion could be revoked, pollsters say.
A new Supreme Court ruling providing states greater freedom to restrict abortion access, which could come before the 2022 elections, would dramatically change that equation by making the debate far more tangible.”It’s one thing to say it’s a symbolic issue that signals what team you play for,” says Robert P. Jones, founder and CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies Americans’ attitudes about cultural issues. “But it’s another thing to say this is something that is actually going to affect people’s lives on the ground, their health, their ability to plan their families. All of these are very concrete ways in which this issue could come out of the abstract intellectual debate into the streets in a way we haven’t seen” for decades.
I wonder. It’s a woman’s issue. It’s an old and unexciting one. I just have a feeling it will arouse certain groups but won’t translate into any kind of mass uprising. I hope I’m wrong.
Brownstein goes on to recount the history of this issue since Roe and it’s depressing. But you knew that. The future looks like it’s going to be even worse:
With the prospect in sight that a more conservative Supreme Court may authorize tighter limits, Republican-controlled states are passing laws at an accelerating pace that clearly undermine Roe’s protections: This year alone, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas have all approved legislation banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can occur as early as six weeks into pregnancy, in practice a near-total prohibition. Arkansas went further, banning abortion “except to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency,” and Oklahoma passed a similar law in addition to its heartbeat measure. For now, Roe prohibits the enforcement of those laws, but that could change depending on how the court rules in the Mississippi case.
In practice, red states already impose many more obstacles to abortion than blue ones, but conservatives welcome the prospect that the court would allow them to diverge further on the core legal question of access to abortion at all.Allowing states to set their own disparate rules on abortion “would certainly stabilize the issue by returning the question back to the hands of the American people,” Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, a social conservative group, wrote me in an e-mail. “This is the work of freedom, allowing our citizens to debate the issue and develop new policies by convincing one another of what is best.”
They are lying, of course. They have been lying about this for years. Their strategy has been to get the court to “devolve” the issue back to the states where they can force abortion rights advocates to have to split their resources among 50 different governments and then ban abortion where they can and whittle it away elsewhere. I’m not sure they wouldn’t prefer this to an outright ban by the Supreme Court. It racks up wins and keeps their people engaged without having to find something else to torture women with.
I fully expect the Supremes to uphold that Mississippi law and open the door for an effective ban in many states. But abortion will never go away. Women will die, they will go to jail, they will have their lives destroyed just it happened before Roe.
I’m pessimistic about this mostly because I feel as if McConnell’s packed court just makes it all so futile. Unless the Democrats are willing to get radical to save the country and do things like add seats to the Court, it’s hard to see how normal Americans don’t just end up feeling impotent. The right’s stranglehold on the the Supreme Court combined with their determination to cheat in elections is very hard to combat with the legitimate means we all value. Remember, they have gotten to this point by losing 8 of the last 9 epresidential elections, ruthless gerrymandering and relying exclusively on the undemocratic Senate and electoral college to consolidate political power and use it without mercy.
We are hurling backwards in dozens of ways even as the culture is move forward. It’s still possible to stop it but I don’t think the Democrats have fully grappled with just how acute the problem really is.
Read the whole Brownstein analysis if you have the time. It’s very educational …