The Wages of Undoing Roe

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“Be careful what you wish for.” — Modern political proverb.

An old joke about a successful family of lawyers goes like this: One day, the hotshot and headstrong son arrives home triumphant. “Father, father!” he cries. “Remember the Jones case, which our family has defended for so long? I settled it, and for a reasonable sum.” His father stares at him with horror. “You fool!” the father shouts. “You have cut down the tree that has nurtured this family for three generations.”

And so it will be with Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court appears poised to cut it back, if not cut it down entirely. Women will no longer have a constitutional “right” to an abortion. Or the states will be free to cut the right back so far in duration that a woman who fails to notice one or two missed periods will lose it. Of course the poor and marginalized will hurt the worst; they won’t be able to travel far to get the medical services they need.

Like the prodigal son of our joke, he “right-to-life” right will be exultant. But the Republican Party will lose a twisted issue that has sustained it for nearly half a century.

What, if anything, does the Republican Party stand for? It doesn’t like government. It doesn’t like taxes. It doesn’t like regulation. It doesn’t believe in science, especially when science proves that lucrative private businesses like tobacco, fossil fuels and social media are harmful to humanity’s health.

It doesn’t much like masks, testing or vaccines, even in the middle of a pandemic. At least it doesn’t like pushing “free people” into these things, even if it will save their own lives and others’. It doesn’t like health insurance for people who have trouble affording it. At least it tried, ultimately unsuccessfully, to repeal Obamacare many times, with nary a concrete or credible plan to replace it.

So what does the so-called “Grand Old Party” actually like? War, maybe.

At least it seemed to love the two utterly gratuitous “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, which its own prodigal son, Dubya, started. And it seems to want to come as close to war as possible with China and Iran. Every time budgets come up, the only department’s that the GOP reliably pushes to increase is the military’s. Even our woefully dilapidated physical infrastructure only got a few renegade Republican votes.

So for nearly fifty years, Roe filled a huge gap in the Republicans’ platform—if you can call relentless naysaying a “platform” at all. (Recently, the party gave up rationalizing entirely and all but declared the Demagogue its platform.)

Roe let Republicans’ say they stand for something positive: babies’ lives. Their slogan should have been “we stand foursquare for unwanted fetuses.” But “pro-life” sounds so much better. Who can be against life?

Of course Republicans’ position was really a negative: criminalizing abortion. But they spun their position as “pro-life,” and, for many voters, it stuck. It stuck big time. Theirs may have been the most successful campaign of political propaganda in human history.

The “pro-life” ploy succeeded so miraculously because it seemed something supremely simple in a complex world. It had visceral emotional appeal, particularly among families that had had trouble having children, or that had lost them.

Who besides experts understands what’s causing the current burst of inflation, or whether it will last? Who can parse the long agony of our “forever wars” and say, for certain, where mistakes were made and how foolish it was to start them at all? Who can produce statistics to say whether our undocumented workers—our modern serfs—actually make our lives easier or are rapists and murderers as the Demagogue claimed? Being for letting babies come to term and be born was so much simpler and clearer than any of this.

So abortion was demagoguery’s gift from God. How can our law let nine old unelected lawyers allow women to kill their own babies? I’ve known distinguished and highly educated people who voted for a Republican president based on this single issue.

But once Roe is gone or defanged, the issue will go with it. At least its supposed clarity and simplicity will decline.

The “battle over babies” will shift from the federal courts to the state legislatures. There will be more live, unwanted babies to put up for adoption, or to be warehoused. So the issue of “killing babies” will shift to who will support or pay for all those unwanted children that couldn’t be aborted.

In other words, the reality of feeding children with no parents will supersede the false issue of “baby killers.” As in all cases of practical care for people who can’t care for themselves, voters will have to fight this battle on Democrats’ grounds. As long as the Democrats are smart enough never to mention the word “socialism,” even in denial, they will win. At the end of the day, Americans will not let hungry people starve in the streets.

The geographic political arena will shift, too. The most incongruous thing about the entire fifty-year-long abortion battle is how little it reflected political reality.

The President of the United States, as such, has virtually nothing directly to do with abortion. It’s almost entirely an issue of state criminal and civil law. Yet for almost half a century, the GOP has dragged the issue into every presidential campaign.

The reductio ad absurdum came in 2016, when millions of voters elected the Demagogue, and thousands of political underlings thereafter supported him, just in the hope that he would appoint new Supreme Court Justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. Once Roe is gone, what justification remains for supporting such a vile, lawless, selfish and incompetent man?

Once that mission is accomplished, there will be no other issue—at least none on the horizon— with such visceral impact. Nothing else could so completely distract voters from all the things that any president can and should do. Voters then may pay attention to appointing smart economists to manage the economy, supporting labor in its struggle against oppression by artificial intelligence, and making sure workers and the public are safe from pandemics and harmful products like tobacco and toxic chemicals.

Voters will have to think again, or they will have to elect representatives who can think for them. Real issues will emerge from the muck of “gut feelings” and demagoguery.

The final shift that Roe’s undoing will promote is from the national to the local level. For half a century, the horror of alleged “baby killing” kept many voters who wouldn’t otherwise care interested in national politics. Who were these voters? Large numbers were people from rural areas and small towns.

They live where they do and as they do because they mostly want to be left alone. They get motivated to “go national” only when it appears that external disorder is coming to their peaceful provinces, or when they perceive the horror of something like “baby killing” is occurring on a grand scale. Once they think that “baby killing” has stopped and that their homes can remain peaceful, they will go back to sleep.

Elsewhere, in the cities and suburbs, women will arise. They will see the assaults on their freedom and autonomy clearly. They will take a greater interest in voting locally. So will poor women whose autonomy is denied and whose lives are complicated by having no family-planning clinics within a reasonable radius.

Once Roe is gone and they want to improve their lives, voters everywhere will understand O’Neill’s Law: that all politics is local. Together with wealthier migrants from blue states, they will turn out to vote in greater numbers. They will turn our red and purple states permanently blue, beginning with Georgia, Virginia and even Texas.

This will be Stacey Abrams’ time. That’s why she just announced her second run for governor of Georgia. That’s why she earlier called Joe Manchin’s bluff, agreeing to voter ID in exchange for a watered-down voting rights law.

Abrams knows that scoundrels can go only so far in suppressing other people’s votes. She knows that millions like me, nationwide, will support her efforts with money and labor. If suppressed voters require voter ID, we will help them get the ID cards and pay for them. If suppressors put polling places far away, we will drive voters to the polls or pay for buses to take them. If suppressors concoct long lines and criminalize providing water to those waiting in line, we will buy them backpacks full of water bottles and folding chairs to sit on while waiting.

Democracy delayed is democracy denied. A century and a half since the Civil War is quite enough delay. So we, together with migrants from the north and west, will bring democracy to the hinterlands. We will do so while the poor, deluded folk—those who worry only about “killing babies” because they can’t understand how the oligarchs are quite legally stealing everything—are lulled to sleep. The undoing of Roe will be their lullaby.

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