Roe at 40: Who’s winning the abortion battle?

“Happy birthday to Roe v. Wade,” said Michael Mechanic in MotherJones.com, or at least to “what’s left of it.” Forty years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court established in that controversial decision that women have a legal right to abortion. Ever since, however, pro-life groups and Republican lawmakers have been chipping away at Roe with public-funding restrictions, mandatory sonograms, and other punitive measures. The result, in 2013, is that almost nine of 10 counties no longer have any doctor or clinic that performs abortions, and in conservative states like Kansas and Mississippi, Roe exists only in legal theory. This trend should be applauded, not condemned, said Marjorie Dannenfelser in WashingtonExaminer.com. The tide on abortion is turning, and polls now show about half of all Americans “identifying as pro-life.”

Polls notwithstanding, “pro-lifers are not winning,” said National Review in an editorial. The restrictions many states have adopted represent laudable “resistance to an injustice,” but can be overcome by driving to a city where abortion is freely available. With 56 million unborn children “killed in the womb” since Roe—another 3,400 every day—any suggestion that abortion is on the wane “is obscene.” While many people claim the pro-life label out of moral ambivalence, said Eric Zorn in ChicagoTribune.com, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this week found that 70 percent of respondents oppose Roe being overturned. As repulsive as abortion may be to many Americans, they are even more repulsed “by the idea that the government could force a woman to remain pregnant against her will.”

What would happen if abortion became illegal again? said Kate Manning in The New York Times. Women would do what women have done throughout history: Choose abortion “by their own hands.” In the ghastly dark ages before Roe, women swallowed lye or strychnine, shot turpentine into their own wombs with syringes, punctured themselves with knitting needles, and threw themselves down flights of stairs—all in hopes of ending their pregnancies. An unwanted pregnancy can trigger such desperation that women will endure any risk and suffer any pain to regain control of their bodies and their destinies. “There is no law that will end the practice of abortion, only laws that can protect a woman’s right to choose it, or not.” Let’s not be deluded about what will happen if that right is removed.

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