Alternate History #5: Roe v. Wade heads back to the states!

Recently, certain states in Mexico have begun to legalize abortion in increasing numbers of circumstances. Mexico is generally more culturally conservative than the US, but it has worked out a totally different system of federalism and states' rights for abortion. The central government won't dictate policy, and each state can set its own limits. The more developed, cosmopolitan states have begun to legalize more kinds of abortions.

Obviously there are opponents to this measure, but in the state which have legalized, these objectors - mainly religious Catholics - are seen as needlessly domineering. Could something similar have happened in the US?

Some people have argued that Supreme Court decisions dictate American culture - Brown v Board eliminated the validity of segregation which was still enjoying some popular support in the south. Yet sometimes Supreme Court decisions create opposition movements - Roe v Wade is the most obvious of these. Before Roe, abortion law in the US was a patchwork of permissive laws in liberal states to total restriction in the conservative ones to any number of moderate limitations in the Midwest.

When Roe made all US abortion law uniform by making it a right, it didn't change the culture the way Brown did. The reason for this difference escapes me - why did one decision make the result more popular, the other make it less popular? Both decisions were for generally liberal causes, done in the face of large opposition which was largely in the south. However, the difference between the cases does not change this fact: in Roe, a large number of states were dragged further to the political left in abortion law than they were willing to accept.

But what if the Supreme Court had decided that they couldn't form a majority opinion in Roe? What if they decided that any result would have been too divisive for both Court and Country? What if the Court had given a unanimous opinion that abortion policy was a state matter, not to be handled at the federal level?

Several things would change. First, I believe that a large amount of the power and popularity enjoyed by the pro-life movement comes, originally, from the top-down manner in which Roe imposed new law. Roe created a rally point - the number of religiously-motivated politicians vowing to 'overturn Roe' is proof of this. Without something both symbolic and federal, the pro-life movement could never have attained its current clout and power.

So in 1973, when abortion becomes a state matter, the laws are all over the place. What this means is that some states with total bans would border others with very slight restrictions. It's unlikely that laws prohibiting travel across state lines to procure abortion would have passed - they might be ruled unconstitutional by state or federal courts. This means that each state is not a 'black box' - people in restricted states could travel into a neighboring state if they wanted an abortion.

In an article about the Mexican state laws, the commentator, a rather utopian libertarian, pined that if Roe had gone back to the states, laws all around the nation would be much more liberal and acceptable. I think this is a bit naive, since it seems to assume that the wave of cultural conservatism starting in the 1980s, and possibly ending with this current election, would not have happened, or would be much weaker. I personally think Roe help the political Christian movement - always present but dormant until the 80s - come back into the mainstream. Roe woke up the religious conservatives but did not create them. What this means is that if abortion law was a state matter today, the red states might even be tightening their restrictions or banning the process entirely. To assume that, without Roe, abortion law would gradually 'progress' to liberal law is wrongheaded.

But in red states, where religious conservatives sought to ban all abortions, there might be an additional wrinkle. Even with Roe, certain states (I'm looking at you, South Dakota) have tried total bans anyway. If Roe was liberal overreaching at the federal level, there's no reason to think there wouldn't be conservative overreaching at the state level. In this alternate timeline, during the apogee of the conservative Christian movement certain states would have issued total bans and found their general population just as upset as people were over Roe. The reason abortion law becomes so contentious is that it is often settled by one side muscling its morality upon the other. This creates resentment, and the conservatives who tried total bans in their states would find that out for themselves.

My opinion is that by 2008, all or almost all state laws would allow abortions for rape, incest and the health of the mother. A great number would allow it fully, and a few states would have no parental consent laws for minors. Abortion law handled at the state level is less divisive and creates less hatred between pro-choice and pro-life. Plus it pushes the aggregate law towards moderation since any overstepping will cause an adverse reaction.

More on Blacks & Abortion from TVV

TheValuesVoter, the author of the post which I critiqued a while back, has posted several comments on this blog. One is the series of statistics I had mentioned in that critique. These stats continue to uphold my assertion that black people in America find themselves in the situations that cause people to want abortions more frequently than whites or other groups do. This accounts, I would argue, for the imbalance in abortion rates between communities - not some plan to slow the growth of the black population or some ill-defined idea of 'coercion' that TVV sometimes talks about.

I'd like to take an opportunity to talk about another of TVV's posts on the subject, one comparing the unacknowledged personhood of slaves to the unacknowledged personhood of fetuses/embryos/whatever word you want to use.

The big quote to critique:

They're not pro-abortion. They're pro-choice!! And to the people who would reply this way, there is some huge difference in the two.

Let me try to quickly explain why there isn't really any.

Unfortunately, the justification boils down to the following: slavery was bad, and slaves weren't seen as people. Thus, another case where something seen by only certain persons as 'human' is also wrong.

There can be a huge variance between what you think about 'conception and such' and the response you give to the question, "Are you pro-choice?" This reminds me of Presidential Candidate Santos on the last season of the West Wing, who was pro-choice in most respects but believed abortion to be murder. He gained this belief from his religious values, and he asserted that it wasn't his place to let his religious values guide his policies.

There's something vaguely unhinged behind TVV's little essay, which does a good job of picking out quotes that make it seem like an easy equation between living slaves and living fetuses. But when does like begin? I will answer that question: I don't know. We don't know and can't know scientifically right now. If life did begin at conception, and you could prove it to me, I'd have to think differently than I do now. If your only proof is a religious idea or a suspicion, I cannot accept it in determining my opinion.

And for all you feminists out there, I haven't left out the concerns of the mother because she's not important. I just wanted to answer TVV on his own terms on the subjects he talks about. But, coming soon, an alternate history in which Roe V. Wade is...dismissed.

Blacks and Abortion

I found this little something-or-other via Real Clear Politics under the title "How Obama lets us down on abortion" or somesuch. The real name of the article is "The Impact of Abortion on African Americans". It is, quite simply, a black-solidarity call to oppose abortion. Unabashedly pro-life, it does not descent into moralistic shouting which means that the statements made in it can be legitimately critiqued.

A quote will give a bit of the tenor of the article:

Although African Americans make up 12.4 percent of the U.S. population we make up 35% of the abortions

Note the 'we'. The article has black solidarity and unity running constantly through it. The reasons given to oppose abortion are not conservative or morality-based, though I do detect a certain abortion-is-murder mentality to the article. The real reason to oppose abortion, the author argues, is specifically black:

Even though abortion usually
happens as the result of a voluntary action by the expectant mother
(but not always), it has long been suspected that certain organizations
have encouraged blacks in particular to have abortions.

"Which organizations would these be?", you might ask:

Planned
Parenthood, which has long been suspected by many of placing its
clinics in areas with high concentrations of African Americans, and
whose founder once spoke at a Ku Klux Klan meeting and who spoke at
another point with Nazi anthropologist Eugen Fischer, stated that it had taken "corrective action" against the individual.

Despite the conspiracy-theory suggestions and the obligatory mentioning of Nazis and the KKK, the tone remains level-headed. When someone says such things as this but doesn't bluster, you must actually answer their statements with your own.

What the article gets wrong is the cause of abortion. It's not availability of clinics, though this does have an influence. When asked why they choose to have an abortion, the plurality of women pick, as the most important reason, 'could not support child financially.' {This is from a Time Magazine article about a year ago, I cannot find a link to it} Other important reasons include: 'unstable living arrangement', 'unstable partnership', and 'too young to take care of a child.'

The fact is that African-Americans are more often in the situation that causes women to want an abortion. It's not that they're black, it's that blacks are poor and/or financially unstable in much higher proportions than whites, at least in urban areas where clinics are more available.

So even though some people do approve of the overwhelmingly disproportionate number of black women who have abortions [They exist. I have met them.] the purpose of supporting choice for women is not to keep any racial group from out-breeding whites.

As to the question of how to end the racial imbalance of abortions, the answer is to find some way to make real lasting wealth available to African-Americans who are in a bad way. This explicitly does not mean some kind of welfare payment, since that does not fit my definition of 'lasting wealth.' This issue is far too large to deal with in one post, but I've done what I came to do: refute the notion that blacks must stand together in opposing abortion because of its effects on the black community and population. As with any group of people, no political affiliation is required by ones race. Meanwhile, for those who say that only liberal causes play identity politics, I suggest you take a good hard look at "The Values Voter's Blog."