It doesn’t seem like it now, with the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal roiling the nation. But we may someday look back on June 24, 2022, as the day we started out toward a compromise, even consensus, on abortion.
Roe was poorly decided on constitutional grounds, a fact that even abortion-rights supporting liberals have acknowledged. It was always tenuous legally, and that’s partly why we’ve fought over it for decades.
But most Americans support abortion rights at some level. And most see abortion as an evil to be minimized as much as possible. We haven’t heard those perspectives enough in the last 50 years because Roe prevented the level-finding for which our constitutional and political systems are designed.
