Word: roe
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Political debate, in the end, could force both sides to move in from the extremes. As they vie for support from those with more ambivalent views, pro- choice advocates who felt they had little to gain by discussing abortion after Roe made it legal may now be forced to consider under what circumstances it might be immoral, and to show tolerance for the thinking of the other side. The same process might persuade pro-lifers to acknowledge that a fetus does not develop in a vacuum but entwined in the flesh of another human being with rights and a life...
...fact that the abortion issue is now a nightmarish gauntlet that has to be run between two ravening mobs. Not because of last week's Webster decision, which opened the door (at least partway) to legislation restricting a woman's right to abortion, but because of the famous Roe v. Wade decision of 16 years ago, creating that virtually absolute, constitutional abortion right, which Webster partially overturned...
...Before Roe, abortion was slowly being legalized, state by state, under varying rules, amid moderate controversy. Roe told abortion supporters and opponents alike that it was all or nothing at all, a Manichaean battle in which compromise was impossible. A generation of social-issue conservatives was politicized and mobilized. As a result, today's Republican Party officially endorses a human-life amendment that would not merely return the abortion issue to the states but would constitutionally ban abortion except to save the mother's life...
...argue it either way about who will win the coming legislative battles over abortion and what effect those battles will have on politics at large. My bet is that the repeal of Roe (especially if it is completed by the court next year, as seems likely) will awaken and politicize social-issue liberals the way Roe itself energized conservatives 16 years ago. From 1973 until recently, abortion mattered a lot more to the antis than to the pros; that is already starting to change. The new politics of abortion will also put many Republican politicians in the sort of bind...
...take place anyway), available only for certain weighty reasons in mid-pregnancy and generally unavailable for the last few weeks. But we would arrive at that sensible arrangement without all the embarrassing intellectual paraphernalia of "trimesters" and "viability" that came out of Justice Blackmun's futile effort, in the Roe decision, to derive a necessary compromise between moral absolutes from first principles. There are no first principles, constitutional or otherwise, that can settle the abortion question once and for all; only politics can do that...