For nearly half a century, the Supreme Court freed Americans from thinking hard about abortion. Its decisions in Roe v. Wade and later cases removed the matter from legislative consideration. That liberated voters from the responsibility to consider the competing values at issue. Whatever you think of those rulings — and in my judgment, they were bad jurisprudence — they had the effect of permitting extremism on both sides to flourish.
Everyone knew that the law was fixed in concrete, freeing all to entertain the kind of purism that feels great in the abstract and only begins to curdle when applied in reality. Zealous pro-choicers could argue that any limitation on abortion at any stage of pregnancy for any reason was an unacceptable burden on women’s autonomy. Fanatical pro-lifers could counter that ending a human life, even one conceived in rape or incest, was murder.
