After Roe v Wade?
If Roe v Wade were overturned by the Supreme Court, then abortion law would go back to the states. Caveat: A right-wing Congress might try to create national legislation on the subject. They might well be able to affect the legality of prescription drugs as used as emergency contraception or as chemical abortificants, because the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that prescription drugs really are an interstate trade by definition. Could they go beyond that? Probably not - but keep your eye on
ReligiousTolerance.org has a web page that analyzes the likely state law outcome, state by state, looking at what laws are still on the books, and what laws the states have tried to pass but had struck down under Roe. It is worth remembering that this is only an approximation, an educated guess. Lots of Republican state legislators have played to their social conservative base by voting for laws that they personally hated, counting on the Supreme Court to strike them down. (Since Supreme Court cases cost at least one million dollars each, that's an expensive waste of taxpayer money for campaign purposes, but since nobody can prove that any one specific legislator is insincere in voting for abortion restrictions, they get away with it. Still, there are rumors.) What's more, remember that 1/3 of the electorate is literally of two minds on the issue. You can ask the same voter the same question twice in one poll, making only minor non-substantive changes to how you word the question, and get both answers out of one third of the voters. If that 1/3 saw their own family and friends seriously endangered by abortion restrictions, we might see the pendulum swing back towards protection of abortion. Or we might not. The point is, this is only an informed opinion as to which states abortion would remain legal in and which ones it wouldn't. I've taken their list and displayed it as a map, because the actual geography of this is important to my next point:
States colored in red are, in their opinion, almost certain to outlaw abortion in all or nearly all cases. States in yellow are likely to severely curtail abortion in many cases, and may outlaw it altogether. States colored in green are the states where ReligiousTolerance.org thinks that more severe abortion restrictions are unlikely to pass. Let me call your attention to one interesting fact: almost every state that is highly likely to outlaw abortion touches a state that won't outlaw abortion at some point along its border.
Now, the US Constitution itself is 100% clear, unambiguous, adamant, and inescapable on the right of Americans to travel freely between states, period. Case law regarding the Mann Act suggests that this right does not apply to minors. That's an important caveat for pregnant teens in a post-Roe America. Nonetheless, if an adult woman wants to get in her car and drive across town or across the state, whichever is necessary in order to find a clinic or hospital that's willing to perform an abortion on her, there isn't a single thing that any state or local jurisdiction can do to stop her. And, in fact, for at least a decade before Roe something rather like that was the status quo: women who wanted safe, legal abortions simply had to have the money to travel to somewhere where abortion was legal. Poor women took their chances in back alleys or with self-inflicted injuries hoping to induce a miscarriage.
What's more, the anti-abortion movement's campaign of terror back in the 1980s and early 1990s had a chilling effect. This is almost the status quo now. In many, many of those "red" anti-abortion states, doctors are no longer willing to perform abortions in nearly any rural clinic or hospital. Already, 86% of all counties, including 95% of all rural counties, have no local access to abortion. (Source: Alan Gutmacher Institute.) Women who want abortions in a lot of places are already having to drive or be driven hundreds of miles for them, and to plan for an overnight stay in the process because of mandatory waiting periods. So if you look at it that way, a repeal of Roe wouldn't be that different fom the America we live in now. It would create more local tragedies, more individual tragedies, more hardship for individual poor women and almost certainly raise the death toll from suicide and/or botched self-abortion among teenage girls. But the effect would be small, reporting on it would be minimal outside of the specifically pro-abortion lobbying groups, and Americans could mostly ignore the difference until it bit them personally in the behind, until someone they knew personally and cared about was hurt.
Or could they ignore it? Would they? Transportation is a lot cheaper than it was before Roe v Wade. When I want to scare myself, I squint at that map and see that the illegal abortion states are awfully geographically contiguous. And what's more, in a lot of those states, there are some very energized anti-abortion lobbying groups, sometimes even still-active anti-abortion terrorist groups. If it were open, common knowledge that, say, women in Little Rock were being bused or shuttled or given train tickets, and given lodging space, so that they could get abortions in Memphis and then come back, how long with Arkansans put up with that? Same question, Greenville SC to Talahassee or Baltimore? How about Crawford, TX to West El Paso, NM? Or to make things really interesting, how about Detroit to Ontario? Remember that tension over the Underground Railroad, and perceived northern encouragement of slave revolts, was a major cause of the War Between the States.
Most of my long-term readers know by now that I'm a huge fan of William Strauss & Neil Howe's Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. In it, they point out that some time between 2010 and 2020, the pieces will have fallen into place for America to have a major war, a major civil disruption of some kind. Boomers will control all of the highest offices in the land and to Baby Boomers, like all Idealist generations, everything they care about is a Matter of Principle Worth Fighting About. The middle leadership will be cynical (Reactive) Generation Xers, perfectly willing to spend other people's blood if that's what a job requires. The fighting ranks of America's military, and the rest of the age group ideal for recruitment, will be the (Civic) DARE Generation, who had it hammered in to them from the earliest of ages that they must stick together, they must escape the moral temptations that supposedly wrecked the next-older generation, and that some day it will be up to them and their teamwork and moral values to Save the World. That's a war-fighting generational constellation, not unlike the one that won World War II. But World War II was fought against an external enemy. Exactly once in American history have we seen this generational constellation when America's perceived enemy was other Americans -- in 1860. It tore the country apart.Could the overthrow of Roe v Wade plunge America into Civil War, somewhere 10 or so years later down the road? I'd like to think not, but something like it has happened before. In any case, it's highly unlikely. It's worth pointing out that some of America's most liberal Supreme Court justices, like Hugo Black, have been appointed by Presidents who thought they were getting fire-breathing conservatives but who morphed quickly into liberals when they actually got into the job. It's also worth pointing out that the Supreme Court is and always has been a profoundly conservative organization, and I don't mean that in the left/right sense, but in the sense of really, really revering established precedent and hating change. It's also worth pointing out that in order for an underground (or even above-ground) railroad for what will certainly be labelled "abortion mills" to become a Second Civil War issue, it would take millions of people thinking that abortion was an issue worth killing or dying for, not mere hundreds.
But when I want to scare myself about a post-Roe future, I don't foresee a future where all 50 states outlaw abortion. I foresee a future where dozens of states outlaw abortion ... and care an uncomfortably great deal about the states that almost certainly won't.
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bradhicks- J. Brad Hicks
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Sydney Morning Herald. Friday 6 August 2004
It is middle-class married battlers, not promiscuous teenagers, who are making up the bulk of abortion patients in Australia, writes Michael Bradley.
One in three Australian women will undergo an abortion. One in three Australian pregnancies will be terminated. Abortion has become Australia's third most commonly performed gynaecological procedure. These are the statistics that make up what the federal Health Minister, Tony Abbott, calls a "national tragedy".
Each week about 2000 women choose to terminate pregnancies.
Although Abbott uses phrases such as "easy way out", "teenage promiscuity" and "moral failings" when discussing abortion, many of his recent comments perpetuate our assumption of these women as single, promiscuous, and young.
Yet the Australian abortion patient of 2003 was far more likely to be in her 40s or late 30s than in her teens.
While the number of abortions performed in Australia has remained relatively constant for several years, the past decade has seen a dramatic ageing of the abortion patient.
Sorry 'bout the length of that. And the article on the SMH's website now appears to be archived and they charge for retrieval, hence it's a second hand version.
Anyway, the article goes on to suggest that older women are having abortions for economic reasons.
I quote the article because it appears to suggest that (given the number of abortions remains constant) fewer teenagers are having abortions. I find it curious that the anti-choice lobby love to play up the idea of abortion as something silly, selfish children do...when it appears that in a country where education about contraception is part of the school curriculum (I knew how to use a condom about six years before I had sex - and I was at a religious school), teenagers are not, in fact, that likely to get pregnant.
Rather frighteningly, our recent election results (coalition returned with an increased majority) means that I might be dead in an alleyway sometime in the next few years.
Cheers.
California is shown as a "yellow" state, but I can guarantee that liberalized abortion laws would fly through the state legislature at flank speed if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned. There are a lot of people in this state who will hit the streets on this issue.
The anti-abortion groups have had a multi-tiered strategy for reducing abortions in this country: going after doctor education, shutting down clinics, pressuring hospitals / HMOs / insurance plans, targeting abortion doctors, etc.
The only effective strategy they haven't tried is encouraging contraception. Funny that.
There are two clinics that I know of here in the St. Louis area. One is in my home town -- it *is* a bunker. It's a concrete building that is two stories tall. There are no windows on the first floor. On the first floor of the building is an indoor garage for staff cars -- staff parks inside because their cars were being constantly vandalized. The rest of the first floor is a security office, where the armed security guard checks women in (if you don't have an appointment, you can't go in), and a reception desk where they tell you to go upstairs. The entire rest of the clinic is on the second floor. They have reason to be afraid here -- in the late 70's, the clinic doctor and his wife were kidnapped and held prisoner for a couple of weeks. The fundies were trying to convert them.
The other clinic is by the Washington University medical school complex. I've never been inside of it, but it's at least semi-fortified. It has an 8 foot iron fence all the way around it. There are spikes on top of the fence, too.
Not sure where Brad (or perhaps the reference he cites) gets the idea of Gen Xers as being that willing to let others die in the name of *blah*. That seems to be more a characteristic of the outgoing ruling generation. We may be quieter and more skeptical, but I don't get the sense that we shy away from personal involement or hard work.
One of the debate frames that drives me the most insane is the assumption that abortion is the preferred method of contraception. I cannot imagine this to be the truth among anyone. Worse, there are times when there is an urgent medical need for it, such as with the case of anencephaly or hydrocephalus, where the fetus will not thrive outside the womb and die at birth, and possibly jeopardize the life of the mother. Anti-choice people gloss over the fact that there can be a medical necessity for the procedure.
I've had some exposure to hard-core pro-lifers. This category doesn't exist for them. Under these circumstances, the suffering of the baby, the death or survival of the baby, the incredible burden placed on the family if the baby lives but basically has only the lizard-brain intact, the survival or death of the mother.... it all falls within the scope of "God's will." Whatever happens, happens. It's part of God's plan. Abortion is always wrong and the proper course of action when faced with these circumstances is to accept them and pray "Thy will be done."
They're scary, scary people.
I'm not saying, mind you, that some women don't kill themselves rather than carry to term in places where abortion is illegal and unavailable. But the anti-abortion side knows that once women knew that all they had to do to get a legal abortion was to lie about intent to commit suicide and abortion magically became legal that many women were willing to tell that lie and many doctors willing to pretend they believed it, and the anti-abortion side has no intention of being hoodwinked by that ever again.
Strauss & Howe argue that Reactive generations, the ones who follow Idealist generations, grow up with severe neglect because their parents are off chasing after some spiritual quest or other. They die at unusual rates, and get worse schooling than the generations on either side of them. They learn to be independent at an earlier age that the other three types of generations, and that they can only depend on themselves. It makes the survivors aggressive capitalists, almost all of America's really wealthy robber barons (until Bill Gates) came from Reactive generations. But such generations also learn in their childhood that life is cheap. If you enlist a Reactive in your cause and he thinks that the way to get his own job done is to march troops into a meat grinder, and those troops are willing to march into that meat grinder, then historically a Reactive captain or major or colonel has no emotional, mental, or moral difficulty giving that order.
Read Generations. No, really, read it. I still think it's the most important (and useful, and informative, and educational, and helpful) book on history written in my lifetime. Even if you don't agree with their main thesis, the particular way that they've structured the book will make American history come alive to you in a way that no other book will ever manage.
Yes, the odd Pluto-in-Leo generation often could be characterized by idealist crusaders, but I tend to think this is overstated in its impact on the children. Not everyone was a flower child idealist, for example. And the really wealthy robber barons are not a significant percentage of the population. Both these groups do tend to be high-profile, with the latter positing itself more as the ruling class of tomorrow, but I think Gen Xers are equally suspicious of plutocracy as well as dewy-eyed idealism.
And personal sacrifices aside, all of the idealism chased was not a complete waste of time or unrealized fantasty. Brown v. Board of Education most noticably stands out in my mind. Much of today's civil rights, while not perfect, are long strides ahead of our parents' generation. So while sacrifice is often called for in the name of idealism, I think we're smart enough to realize that people are something you sacrifice for. Not the other way around.
I'm kind of just speaking off the cuff here, but I'd like to believe that one of the elements present in the ascendant generation (Pluto-in-Virgo -- you'll have to excuse my Astrology references, but it's been on my mind lately), those born between 1965 and 1985, have an element of discrimination and skepticism that previous generations lacked, both of authority and counterculture. We've seen the extremes of both behaviors, and I think it's made us reflective in a different manner.
But I'm speaking as a guy born in 1970, adopted by two parents who were 30 and 35 when they were married, and just a year older when I came on the scene. My parents didn't really fit into either model.
I will try and check that book out, thanks. In what generation was the author born into, though? I'm already looking for bias, of course, but chalk that up to my skepticism :)
Restriction would largely affect the poor, making it more likely that they will have more children. This would strain the social support system in those states (alreadly largely underfunded) increasing the number of children living in poverty. At least one study has put forth the idea that access to abortion has lowered crime rates, making it likely that the contrary will be true.
So you have states with more poverty and higher crime rates. Additionally these states tend also to be considered "unfriendly" to homosexuals, reducing the quality of the work force available to companies in these locations (why do you think that Procter & Gamble spent money to try and change Cincinatti's restrictive laws). This will mean that, over the long run, these companies will underperform further reducing the number of quality jobs in these areas. Thus we'll likely see a larger and large split between the general populations in the "have" states and the "have not" states.
It's like they don't care abut the kid once it's born. It's in this world, it's not our responsibility. WTF?
It is now and always has been about the sex and punishing the guilty. If a woman can use birth control and/or get an abortion, how will I know that she's a "bad girl"? Pregnancy is how sex is punished in a way for all to see. But they can't come out and say that, otherwise only the most self-hating of women would listen.
I remember I used to be pro-life, and couldn't understand why other pro-lifers didn't just support better birth control access and education. Wouldn't that be the easiest way to reduce abortions??
This was when I was a young teenager. I'd like to think I've wisened up since.
However, the only reason that such people care about abortion at all is because they got hoodwinked by the politically motivated lie that a fertilized egg is a child.
My reading of the Religious Right, and by this I mean what I've read in their own literature, suggests that punishment for nonmarital sex is just a means to an end. The big issue is family loyalty. The grass roots literally fear that their spouses and teen or older children will leave them, physically and/or philosophically, for the "temptations" of the larger world. Read the stuff the leaders write, not for the mass media, but for their own constituency. There's plenty of it on the Web and it overtly plays to fears of abandonment. For instance: “Pornography weakens the bond between the husband and the wife... It can ultimately cause a family to split up" (That's from the Atlanta Christian Monthly.) Sex outside traditional marriage is seen as competing with sex inside marriage, so in the capitalist tradition of dissing the competition it is demonized and every effort is made to drive it out of the marketplace of ideas.
Abortion is seen as a means of avoiding marriage in the first place, and thus opposition to it is based on fear of abandonment by offspring rather than spouses. A teen pregnancy that results in an early "shotgun" marriage, with the young couple remaining dependent on their parents for years, is regarded as a better outcome than an abortion that leaves a young woman free to enjoy the single life, move away from her relatives, and maybe never get around to marrying and giving her parents legitimate grandchildren. It may not be the ideal outcome but it's better, from the parents' perspective, than investing enormous amounts of emotional energy into their kids (as many fundie parents do) and then losing the investment when the kids turn out to have minds and plans of their own. Fundie writings in the '70s overtly identified the freedoms that young people have these days as Satanic and, although they don't quite dare phrase it that way anymore, that's still how they see it.
Just my two cents' worth. ;)
I began to see the fear-of-abandonment factor after reading a series of articles in Ms. Magazine about women who vote against feminist causes such as legal abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment -- not speculation; they really sent reporters to talk to these women. Over and over the theme came up: more rights for women will make husbands feel less guilty about leaving their wives. Now, I've known women who were raised very traditionally. I was raised by one, for part of that time in a whole neighborhood of them. I've seen their obsessive insecurity, their fear that they are not sophisticated enough and that their husbands (who by implication are imagined as having the emotional attention span of a toddler, easily distracted by any pretty thing that catches their eye) will leave them for someone more glamourous. It took the Ms. series for me to connect that with female political social conservatism.
This is also where the opposition to government social programs comes in. Also opposition to the drug culture, to gay culture, to any alternatives to family that might offer the disaffected husband or grown son or daughter a place to go that is not home. The temperance impulse, which led mobs of women to bust up barrooms with axes, is just under the surface. For the family to be a haven in a heartless world, the world has to remain heartless.
I don't hang out much with pregnant teenagers (although my oldest son is about to turn 15, so things could change) The folks I have personally known in recent years who had abortions or else didn't and have to live with the consequences are middle aged married ladies who wanted to be pregnant and discovered serious defects/Downs syndrome. Harder to make them sound like sex-crazed baby-killing sluts.
Maybe if you're a archconservative lunatic like Clarence Thomas. The right to privacy didn't spring suddenly from Roe v. Wade like some civil rights Athena from Zeus' constitutional skull. It took decades for the Court to move towards a recognition of a universal principal of privacy, and then to draw its parameters. The concept was first elucidated in 1890, for God's sake. As Brad notes, the Court as an institution is conservative--they don't mind change, but they like their change incremental. Roe v. Wade was hardly a stretch. It was the natural result of a clash between an evolving and more enlightened view of civil rights in the judiciary on the one hand and a repressive and puritanical sexual culture on the other.
It seems highly unlikely that the generation that would be tapped to fight this hypothetical Civil War could be motivated to put their lives on the line to "defend the unborn". I mean, it's one thing for an Alabama teenager attending a fundamentalist high school to declare that "Abortion Is Murder," but it's quite another to put a submachine gun in his hand and order him to shoot the Oregonian "choice freedom fighter".
Remember, when the elites sent the underclass off to die for morality during the last Civil War, there were predictable results. I'm not sure the late teens and twentysomethings of tomorrow would march off to war willingly for much of anything beyond an out-and-out invasion of the United States--i.e. if they felt their lives, their family's lives, or their property was under immediate threat.
I can't see this happening under the current administration. For the most part, the Bush White House has shown great care in selecting their political appointees, and I can't believe that their selection of a SCOTUS justice would be any different. For Christ's sake, the rebellious "liberal" that snuck under Karl Rove's radar during the first four years was Paul O'Neal. I'll guarantee you that the vetting process for a SCOTUS justice under GWB will make everything that came before look like a library card application. We won't get a Souter. If previous appointees to the executive and the judicial are any indication, I'm willing to bet that Bush tries to sneak an archconservative like Scalia or Thomas under the radar as a moderate.
There are already instances of violence at abortion clinics and directed at doctor's who provide that medical service. Can you picture one of those turning into a Waco-type standoff in a liberal state, then having a small to medium group of gun-owning pro-lifers march to their rescue, and a conflagration starting from that? Might be time for us to start stockpiling canned food and toilet paper. And ammunition.
History doesn't exactly repeat itself. But remember that the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the song that the Union Army marched to, is intentionally filked from a popular song praising John Browne's martyrdom. If some particularly articulate murderous abortion opponent chose to emulate John Browne, are we 100% sure it wouldn't have the same effect?
It's easy to say of course not, now -- just as it was obvious in 1850 that some kind or reasonable compromise over slavery could be worked out in the legislature and the courts.
The protest group left quietly after a few hours. Apparently anti-abortion protest is fun only when there are no consequences. Ergo, obviously it falls to us to firmly and consistently provide them with unpleasant consequences for their irresponsible actions.
And the "Social Security crisis" may be something of a scare tactic. Some estimates indicate that even after the trust fund runs out, 81% of the benefits can still be covered. Long-run financing issues, but hardly a bankrupting crisis. I haven't read 1999's Social Security: The Phony Crisis (Baker & Weisbrot) yet, but it may have more to offer.
I keep intending to write a piece called "where they were while we were getting high" about the incredible organization and foresight of the Christian counterculture. But of course I'm too flaky. The truth remains that while pretty much everyone who isn't in the Christian counterculture spent the last thirty years partying, or doing partying that was cleverly disguised as political and/or academic work, and having hangovers, or student loans, the Christian counterculture have almost succeeded in taking over the country.
Now we can all make up stories about how when push really comes to shove we'll resist, but it's total bullshit. Resistance doesn't spring fullblown from a hypnotized, apathetic group who are at heart so convinced of the rightness of their ideas that they think everyone who doesn't agree with them is deluded and just needs re-education. That would be a description of the people who generally support abortion access, btw, although it reads like the way those people like to describe the Christian counterculture.
No, the sides are too unequal for this to be a real conflict. The real conflict, if it comes, will be between the Mormans and the non-Mormon fundamentalists. Alternately, the tension between those powerful groups might be what allows for the rest of us to stay safe. But the day is over when any non-religious group will hold any power in American politics.