Word: roes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...political compromise could deal with subsidiary issues, such as clinic standards and parental-notification requirements, on their own merits, whereas they have until now usually been cynical attempts to sneak around Roe's absolute constitutional ban. On the one side issue pro-choicers have generally lost -- government funding of abortions for poor women -- they might even find the opposition more accommodating once the general issue is open for debate and compromise. Right-to-life absolutists will find themselves isolated. Appeals to fairness, not to mention more cynical arguments regarding the cost to society of poor women having unwanted babies, will...