As of today, May 5th, 2022, it is not certain that the Supreme Court will in fact overturn Roe V Wade. That said, the released draft creates pressure on the Court. Activists will try to pressure the Court into reversing course and leaving Roe intact. But the surge of conservativism and populism in the US and even the world creates a pressure of its own for the Court to follow through with its apparent intentions and overturn Roe.
Roe is a blight on American jurisprudence and culture. It’s legal reasoning is tenuous at best – even its supporters will admit as much – and it has created more legal headaches than it was ever worth. The estimated 62 million dead babies are a moral stain that makes slavery look pale in comparison. The legacy of Roe will be felt for generations, just as the Dred Scott and Plessey cases before it.
If the Court doesn’t overturn it, the Roberts court will go down in history as spineless and complicit. But that’s not the pressure I see pushing the Court to do the right thing. The populace is on the move in ways most elitists – including those on the Court – didn’t foresee. The blind spot for those in power is always that they can’t see themselves as others see them. The pendulum ALWAYS swings – but when you see yourself as justified and smarter than the rabble, you forget that pendulum of political will even exists. The Court, like the media and Congress, suddenly see that pendulum heading straight for them.
Disney, the once powerful juggernaut, just got run over by that pendulum in its own backyard – Florida. But it’s not doing too well in the stock market or the box office – turns out you can take wokeness too far. CNN, the media powerhouse, had to ditch its streaming service CNN+ within three weeks. Something is seriously wrong when a major outlet can only convince 10,000 people to sign up – and it wasn’t just the programming.
Wars usually help incumbent presidents. Most Americans seem highly supportive of Ukraine – we never did like a bully picking on the little guy – yet there is no evidence that Biden has received any kind of uptick in approval. This is a bit strange – most people aren’t keen on foreign policy and aren’t likely to pay much attention to the inner workings of NATO so I doubt most realize what a non-entity Biden is at this point. He sent billions in aid to Ukraine and most people probably do know about that yet his approval remains in the dumpster. It takes a LOT more than a 20% approval rating to have a president so unpopular that even a fairly popular move doesn’t help.
If some idiot leaked the Roe decision in order to help the Democrats in the midterms, boy, is THAT going to fail spectacularly. Abortion simply isn’t the rallying cry it once was – it hasn’t been in over a decade. Worse, the shrieking is being brought to you by people who cannot define ‘woman’ – rational, normal and sane people don’t give a flying flip about the reproductive ‘rights’ of pregnant ‘men’. Purple haired loonies attacking prayer groups do help the cause – just not their cause.
Abortion rates dropped precipitously in the first part of the Twenty-first Century. Estimates at the end of the last century placed the death toll at 50 million – which means most abortions were performed over the 27 years between 1972 and 1999. Only 12 million are estimated to have been performed in the 23 years since – not a great thing, since those are 12 million babies, but a significant enough drop that it’s clear something changed.
Free contraceptives have been around for most of the last fifty years so that can’t be it. Nor have they become magically more effective or easier to use – at least not in that 23 year span. Pretty sure people are still having sex so that’s not it. What could it be?
Abortion was never a good rallying cry – no one wants to be ‘pro-abortion’ except the crazies. Over the last three decades women have become full partners in the economic hub – the housewife is now a rarity. With that shift and the new generations making it up comes an increased awareness of one’s own responsibility for one’s own choices. Contraceptives are free – what kind of idiot needs an abortion?
Only the crazies were ever rabidly pro-choice – and the disquiet we all felt with this deadly choice is felt even more strongly by those who survived it. The succeeding generations that grew up with the unsettling knowledge that they could have been killed on a whim.
Maybe that’s not how they would describe it, but the pro-choice position has been losing popularity for decades despite rebranding from time to time. I’ve even heard a commentator swear up and down that he is pro-choice – but then define it in unquestionably pro-life terms. The millennials and beyond seem to give lip service to the freedom of choice but they don’t seem to truly support the pro-choice position. They don’t argue the old ‘its not a human’ or ‘its a clump of cells’ nonsense. They will try nuanced arguments about the mother’s rights but those arguments are seldom well thought out and usually abandoned quickly when questioned.
I think it boils down to they don’t know why they don’t like abortion, but they just don’t. They want the moral high ground of being on the non-existent ‘right’ side of history, but they don’t really believe abortion is that moral high ground.
Which is why I think Roe will go out with more whimper than bang. The crowds in front of the Court weren’t especially large – and many were in support of overturning Roe. Roe doesn’t seem to be rallying the troops, at least not yet. I doubt it ever will.
The corporate world got a kick in the teeth from trying to spread the stupidity of wokeness – and it’s suddenly very silent on the possibility of Roe being overturned. The media seems in full panic as are the usual roster of political hacks that support abortion. But there doesn’t seem to be any underlying ground surge – the public doesn’t seem to care.
Not surprising, really. For the first time in years, people are seeing the world without the media glasses. The flag they saw so often waved in favor of choice and freedom turns out to be dripping with the blood of infants. And no one sane rallies around a flag drenched in innocent blood.
Here’s to the fall of Roe V Wade – may it never rise again.
