Abortion In The United States

"A holding that the fetus is a constitutional person would have the effect of overruling Roe v. Wade and its progeny. The legal consequences would not, however, be as far-reaching as Roe itself, which had the effect of declaring century-old criminal abortion statutes invalid, cutting deeply into assumed rights of husbands and parents, and creating the possibility of required, at least via legislation, public financing of abortion. On the other hand, the consequence of the Roe decision to the aborted fetus is severe and final. This result, of course, is of no great concern to the rule of law, unless the unborn does meet the criteria of constitutional personhood and the Court either because of poor reasoning or because of some unstated reason arbitrarily denied the unborn the constitutional protections due it or unless the fourteenth amendment is inadequate as a legal device to protect the fundamental rights of all members of the human family, the avowed purpose of the drafters of the fourteenth amendment. In either case, there is reason for concern, for the legal order has failed."

"During the years before January 22, 1973, the day on which the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade and proclaimed that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to decide whether to bring a pregnancy to term, Americans conducted a vigorous debate about abortion’s morality and meaning. It is obvious today that the Supreme Court’s decision did not end this debate. Neither, of course, did the Court start it—although public discussion of Roe v. Wade implies not infrequently that it did."

"By declaring unconstitutional laws that criminalized abortion in states across the country, the decision in Roe v. Wade also swept away much of the collective memory of what had gone before. Records of court cases that had taken years to build were now rendered irrelevant, and transcripts of testimony once painstakingly compiled were carelessly misfiled or discarded. And beyond the loss of paper records, the Supreme Court decision itself proved a distorting lens through which to look back on what had preceded it."

"[T]he fact that neither women nor fetuses figured very prominently in Roe v. Wade makes it plausible to assume that feminist voices and right-to-life voices were simply missing, both from the arguments presented to the Supreme Court and from the public conversation. In fact, feminist and right-to-life positions were passionately expressed in public debate and in friend-of-the-court briefs filed in Roe. Yet, the Supreme Court issued a decision that appeared mainly responsive to the arguments of the medical community. In page after page, Roe reasoned from medical science, and in its main holding affirmed the autonomy of doctors to act in what they believed to be the best interest of their patients. The organized medical profession, which had spurred the criminalization of abortion a century earlier, had come only lately to view the hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions performed every year as a public health problem of urgent dimensions."

"Two years is an unusually long time for a case to remain on the Supreme Court’s docket. As we have already discussed, these were a crucial two years for the meaning of abortion, and it is clear that Roe arrived at the Court’s doorstep in one world and emerged, 27 months later, into another. In October 1970, when the case reached the Supreme Court, New York’s repeal of its abortion law appeared to many people to suggest an inexorable march toward reform. Two years later— during which time 402,100 women, two-thirds of them from out of state, had obtained legal abortions in New York—the Legislature’s attempted repeal of the repeal failed only because of Governor Rockefeller’s veto. In the November 1972 elections, voters in Michigan and North Dakota had defeated proposals to liberalize those states’ abortion laws—and, as we have seen, abortion was one of a constellation of factors playing a role in McGovern’s landslide defeat. In early January 1973, the New York Legislature reconvened in the full expectation of a new effort to recriminalize abortion."

"As we now turn to the arguments that were formally presented to the Supreme Court in legal briefs, an intriguing question arises: What did the justices perceive of the turmoil over abortion outside their own quiet precincts? Clearly, they knew that they had on their hands “a most sensitive, emotional, and controversial” issue, as Justice Harry A. Blackmun described it when he announced Roe and Doe from the bench (see page 245). Further, as Justice Blackmun observed, the Court knew that “the controversy will continue.” The justices had not been hermetically sealed off in their chambers during the long months in which the cases were pending. They lived in the world as husbands and fathers. They had set the cases for a second argument, a sign that they regarded the cases as something other than routine. It does appear, however, that the justices in the 7-to-2 majority were responding to a consensus among the elites, particularly of the legal and medical professions, that change was appropriate and necessary. They appreciated that the decision would provoke controversy, but decided the case on grounds that they had reason to suppose would find broad public acceptance. Non-legal material in Justice Blackmun’s file included the Gallup Poll from the summer of 1972, reflecting substantial majorities supporting decriminalization, even among Catholics [see page 207.] The file also contained a series of articles from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, passed on to Justice Blackmun by Justice Potter Stewart. In these articles, prominently displayed in the newspaper during April 1972, an Atlanta physician, Robert A. Hatcher, M.D. asserted that Georgia’s ALI-type reform law had not gone far enough and was not making enough of a difference."

"Justice Blackmun’s files also contained articles from the American Journal of Public Health (several of which are excerpted in parts I and II), depicting abortion reform as inevitable and highly desirable. This was not the only voice of the medical community the Court heard; among the Roe v. Wade briefs was a strongly worded one from dissenting obstetricians and gynecologists arguing for upholding the Texas law (see page 295). Further, the justices may well have viewed organized opposition to the legalization of abortion as based almost exclusively on Catholic religious conviction, as it primarily was when Roe v. Wade first arrived on the Court’s docket. The only Catholic justice then sitting on the Supreme Court was William J. Brennan, Jr., a liberal whose full support for an expansive right to abortion may have served to emphasize significant differences of opinion about the criminalization of abortion within the American Catholic community, and so undercut the weight of the Catholic opposition."

"A former president of the American Bar Association, the very embodiment of the legal establishment, Powell proved not only a surprisingly strong supporter of the right to abortion but also a strategic ally who pushed Blackmun to extend until later in pregnancy the time period during which women’s abortion decisions received constitutional protection. Any fears the justices may have had that they were embarking on a radical course would have been allayed by Powell’s presence and performance."

"The Supreme Court’s decision reflected the arguments of both parties, as well as many of those contained in the friend-of-the-court briefs filed on both sides. The Court rejected the state’s argument that the fetus was a “person” meriting the same protection under the Constitution as born persons. Nevertheless, the Court found that the state did have an interest in protecting “the potentiality of human life.” Similarly, the Court endeavored to strike a balance in defining the scope of the right to abortion it recognized. The majority reasoned that the right to privacy protected not only the use of contraception, but also a woman’s decision whether to bear a child. Yet, the decision emphasized, this right was not absolute."

"The Court’s lengthy published opinion in Roe is widely available on the Internet. But Blackmun’s brief statement exists only as typescript in the justice’s files at the Library of Congress. A personal judicial pronouncement of this kind shows how the author of an opinion wants the world to understand what the Court has done."

"On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued its decisions in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Following the Court’s custom, Justice Harry A. Blackmun, as the author of the opinions, read a summary from the bench. Known in Supreme Court parlance as “hand-downs,” these summaries are not casual documents. While they are not formally part of the Court’s published opinion, they reflect the author’s view of what matters most about the decision. The marked-up draft in Blackmun’s file shows that he labored over the hand-down. In presenting Roe, Blackmun strives to locate the Court’s decision in history as well as in contemporary public opinion and to demonstrate how the constitutional framework"

"In presenting the Court’s decision throughout his oral announcement as moderate, balanced, and bounded, Justice Blackmun was, no doubt, anticipating and responding to criticism of the Court’s decision."

"The meanings associated with the phrase “abortion on demand” were in flux at the time Roe was handed down. As we saw in Part I, the feminist movement used the phrase in seeking abortion rights during the movement’s Strike for Equality in 1970 [see page 44, the illustration of the flyer]. The feminist claim for abortion “on demand” sought repeal of abortion restrictions; the claim challenged as paternalistic new abortion-reform laws based on the “therapeutic” model. Those laws gave doctors the power to decide whether a woman had a sufficient reason to have an abortion, and so reduced women to supplicants of men and the state. In claiming abortion on demand, feminists asserted that women were fully competent to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy, and should not have such a question decided by a stranger, even a medical professional. But women’s assertion of decisional authority was disturbing to many. What feminists understood as a question of dignity and self-governance their critics saw as an invitation to self-indulgence. Critics of the abortion-repeal movement argued that decriminalization would allow women access to abortion for insufficient reasons, and some suggested that liberalizing access to abortion would encourage moral laxity—sexual license, abdication of maternal responsibility, and a general breakdown of self- and social control. Thus, where feminists asserted that abortion’s criminalization was wrongful because it was insufficiently respectful of women, their critics expressed doubt that women’s judgment in matters of abortion was respect-worthy. Backlash came to torque and flip the very meaning of “abortion on demand.” In the early 1970s, the meaning of the phrase remained unsettled as feminist and antifeminist usages circulated. In April 1971, President Nixon invoked the phrase in his official statement repudiating the Pentagon’s liberal policy that permitted servicewomen to obtain abortions in any military hospital. [see annotation on p. 198, brief in the Struck case.] “Unrestricted abortion policies, or abortion on demand, I cannot square with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life,” the president said. Whether or not Justice Blackmun was aware of the original meaning of the phrase, it is highly likely that he was aware of the negative meaning that “abortion on demand” was then acquiring. In striking this original concluding paragraph of the hand-down, Justice Blackmun appears to have decided that he would address the concerns of Chief Justice Burger and others less contentiously, and emphasize Roe’s moderation in language that distanced the Court from the claims of both abortion rights advocates and their critics."

"Both the right and regulatory interest that Roe recognized emerged from more than a decade of searching public conversation about abortion. Reasoning about the meaning of constitutional precedent in the midst of that conversation, the justices concluded that the right to privacy recognized in Griswold covered not only contraception but abortion as well. The Court conducted a lengthy analysis of historical precedent before declaring that the Constitution protected the abortion decision from state interference until the point of fetal viability. But, in explaining its decision, the Court also invoked or adverted to the judgments of growing numbers of lower courts, the decisions of public authorities such as the Rockefeller Commission that endorsed the legalization of abortion, and measures of popular support for liberalizing access. (In addition to the many briefs in Roe, Justice Blackmun had in his files the papers in Abele v. Markle, Connecticut’s abortion case, and other lower court decisions; documents reflecting the views of organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association; and the 1972 Gallup poll reports showing steadily rising support for decriminalization.)"

"Roe’s holding fused old and new legal frameworks. By protecting a woman’s decision whether to bear a child until the period of fetal viability, the Court recognized as constitutional a framework at least partly resembling abortion “repeal.” Under Roe, government could no longer ban abortion or make access to the procedure conditional on ALI-type indications (for example, rape, maternal health) in the period of pregnancy before viability. But Roe did not altogether bar government from regulating abortion. To the contrary, Roe gave constitutional sanction to government interests in regulating abortion that grow with a pregnancy; it vindicated these interests alongside women’s right to have an abortion through the trimester framework, which allowed government to restrict abortion in the interest of protecting potential life at the point of fetal viability. In the years since Roe, the Court has allowed government more leeway to regulate abortion to express its interest in protecting potential life throughout pregnancy. Roe’s reasoning fused old and new justifications for decriminalizing abortion. Roe indirectly reflected the abortion-rights claims of the women’s movement, recognizing that laws that criminalized abortion inflict constitutionally significant harms on women, and not doctors only. But Roe expressed those harms in public health-inflected language. The decision barred government from coercing women to bear children, but its reasoning did not audibly express the feminist claim (1) that a woman has dignitary interests in making her own decision about whether to bear a child, or (2) that a woman needs the ability to control the timing of motherhood in order to negotiate institutional arrangements that exclude caregivers from participation in the workplace and other arenas of civic life."

"Roe justified the abortion right by appealing to Griswold and earlier decisions that protected the right to make decisions about family life free from state interference. In extending this right to privacy to encompass the abortion decision, Roe reasoned about abortion in terms drawn from the reform debates of the early 1960s, emphasizing the importance of protecting a doctor’s autonomy as much as that of his patients. Women’s advocacy helped establish women as constitutional rights holders who are entitled to make decisions about sex and parenting without control by the state—but Roe barely acknowledged that such claims were circulating in public debate. Instead, the Court explained and justified its holding in lan- guage that depicted doctors as the responsible and authoritative decisionmakers, with women as patients subject to their guidance."

"In representing the abortion decision as one that a woman made under the guidance of her doctor, the Court figured the doctor as the agent responsible for abortion decisions and the criteria guiding those decisions as medical. This form of talk in Roe reflected modes of reasoning current at the time of the opinion."

"Roe’s holding and its reasoning reflected dominant understandings about abortion of the time. In striking down laws that banned abortion or allowed it in only a very few circumstances, Roe decriminalized abortion along the lines that the feminists and others advocated. But the Court gave only blurry and indistinct expression to the values feminists argued were at stake in protecting women’s choices. Something similar might be said of the justification the Court offered for abortion restrictions. The Court gave constitutional approval to a government interest in regulating abortion to protect potential life, but only barely explained or justified this interest, leaving unstated how this regulatory interest related to the old statutes criminalizing abortion or the claims of the contemporary anti- abortion movement."

"If Roe conformed to then-dominant modes of reasoning about abortion, at a time when the Gallup poll reported the belief of two-thirds of Americans that the abortion decision should be left to a woman and her doctor, how are we to understand the outcry against the decision that steadily mounted over the 1970s? Our review of the debate before Roe reveals several factors contributing to the conflict over abortion that were in play well before the Court issued its decision in January 1973, and identifies still other developments that intensified the conflict much later in the decade."

"The reframing of abortion that would take hold over the course of the 1970s had only incrementally begun at the time the Court handed down Roe. (The first justice to join the Court after Roe was John Paul Stevens, nominated in December 1975. His views on abortion were unknown, yet at his Senate confirmation hearing, he was not asked a single question about abortion.)"

"In the immediate aftermath of Roe, organized opposition to the decision was still carried by the National Right to Life Committee and the Catholic Church. The National Right to Life Committee began mobilizing in support of a constitutional amendment that would overturn Roe and constitutionalize an embryo’s/ fetus’s right to life, thereby requiring all states to recriminalize abortion. By 1975, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops had promulgated a Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities that declared that “the decisions of the United States Supreme Court (January 22, 1973) violate the moral order, and have disrupted the legal process which previously attempted to safeguard the rights of children.” The plan urged “[p]assage of a constitutional amendment providing protection for the unborn child to the maximum degree possible,” and “[p]assage of federal and state laws and adoption of administrative policies that will restrict the practice of abortion as much as possible.” During the years after Roe, opponents were unable to muster broad-based support for overturning the decision and requiring abortion’s recriminalization. Many Americans supported the right recognized in Roe, some quite passionately. Others believed that abortion should be decriminalized but criticized the Court for deciding a question that might have been left to the political process. Those who believed the question should have been left to the legislature did not support a human life amendment constitutionalizing prohibitions on abortion of the kind the right-to-life movement was then advocating. Advocates of a human life amendment could not find the support they needed, even among religious leaders."

"In the early 1970s, most Protestant denominations did not share the Catholic Church’s view of abortion. As we have seen, mainline Protestant groups approved of liberalizing access to abortion; some approved repeal, while others endorsed variants of the “reform” position, advocating regulation on the “therapeutic model.” In this period, conservative evangelical groups did not view abortion as a categorical wrong. Even after Roe, in June 1973, Southern Baptist Convention President Owen Cooper criticized the Supreme Court for decisions liberalizing abortion—and banning capital punishment—and then proceeded to observe that the Southern Baptists would support abortions “where it clearly serves the best interests of society.” His view of abortion was far from absolute, and expressed in secular, not religious, terms."

"When Roe was handed down, the family-values movement that would mobilize against the decision and ultimately carry Ronald Reagan to national office in 1980 had already begun to take shape, but it had not yet crystallized. That coalition did not form in spontaneous response to Roe but was instead built with the help of strategists for the Republican Party, including many brilliant Catholic conservatives. In the process, opposition to abortion as murder was married to a variety of socially conservative causes, accelerating the process of party realignment that had begun before Roe during the Nixon administration. When conservatives of the New Right began to assemble a pan-Christian coalition against Roe in the late 1970s, the crusade against Roe would proceed under the banner of “pro-life” and “pro-family.” Phyllis Schlafly’s Stop ERA organization associated the Equal Rights Amendment with abortion and gay marriage, using this frame to mobilize opposition to the amendment’s ratification in state houses across the country. During the mid-1970s, funding battles in Congress provided a lower-stakes arena in which to forge new alliances and erode support for the abortion right. By the late 1970s, Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich—architects of a more conservative Republican Party—were approaching such Protestant evangelicals as the Reverend Jerry Falwell and helping them to see in the abortion issue a question that could create a pan-Christian movement united against “secular humanism” and for “family values.” By 1980, the Christian Harvest Times was denouncing abortion in its “Special Report on Secular Humanism vs. Christianity”: “To understand humanism is to understand women’s liberation, the ERA, gay rights, children’s rights, abortion, sex education, the ‘new’ morality, evolution, values clarification, situational ethics, the loss of patriotism, and many of the other problems that are tearing America apart today.” In this way, a new relationship was emerging among Protestant evangelicals, the Catholic right-to-life movement, and the ascendant conservatives of the New Right. Increasingly lost in this transformation was an earlier Catholic association of a pro-life position with liberal ideals of social justice; forged was an increasingly tight association of pro-life with pro-family politics."

"The Court’s decision in Roe was written by Justice Blackmun, whom President Nixon appointed to the Supreme Court in 1970, and supported by other of Nixon’s conservative appointees, including Lewis Powell, who during the Court’s deliberations actually advocated lengthening the time period in which women’s abortion decision was protected—from the end of the first trimester to the end of the second. But over the course of the 1970s, prominent Republicans shifted positions on abortion, acting on alignments and framings that were already in evidence by the 1972 election. By the decade’s end, conservatives of the New Right—led by Ronald Reagan, who, in the late 1960s, had signed California’s legislation liberalizing abortion—urged fundamentalist Christians to make common cause with Catholics in opposition to abortion and in support of family values. They attacked Roe as a threat to life and family and as a symbol of judicial overreaching. Republican Party platforms began regularly to support “the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.” With Republican presidents appointing justices who might be counted on to oppose Roe, judicial support for the decision narrowed, and by the late 1980s, Roe looked vulnerable to outright reversal. But the women’s movement continued energetically to mobilize in support of the decision, and in 1987 it helped defeat the nomination of Robert Bork, a prominent critic of the Court’s privacy decisions. Ensuing Supreme Court appointments by Presidents Reagan and Bush seemed to provide sufficient votes to overturn Roe. And yet, in 1992—during a presidential campaign in which the abortion right was a burning issue—the Supreme Court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a case that both reaffirmed and narrowed Roe."

"Casey justified both the abortion right and its regulation in terms that reflected the views of mobilized proponents and opponents of abortion rights more clearly than Roe itself had in 1973. Like Roe, Casey held that women had a constitutionally protected right to decide whether to bring a pregnancy to term, but, unlike Roe, Casey allowed government to regulate the exercise of that right from the beginning of pregnancy in the interests of protecting potential life—so long as the regulation did not impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s decision. Even as Casey narrowed the right recognized in Roe, it justified that right more expansively than Roe did. Casey tied constitutional protection for women’s abortion decisions to the fundamental liberty to choose one’s family life, as well as to the understanding—forged in the Court’s sex-discrimination cases—that government cannot use law to enforce traditional sex roles: “Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.” Casey’s account of the constitutional values that the abortion right vindicates makes clear that government respects not only women’s freedom but also their equal citizenship. Yet, Casey also listens carefully to Roe’s critics. It allows government to regulate women’s abortion decisions to express respect for the value of human life, so long as government does so in ways that express respect for the decisional autonomy of women: “[T]he State may enact rules and regulations designed to encourage her to know that there are philosophic and social arguments of great weight that can be brought to bear in favor of continuing the pregnancy to full term and that there are procedures and institutions to allow adoption of unwanted children as well as a certain degree of state assistance if the mother chooses to raise the child herself.” In ways that Roe did not, Casey situates the abortion right in a community deeply divided over the basic values implicated by the debate. That conflict continues—on and off the Court."

"ABSTRACT. Today, many Americans blame polarizing conflict over abortion on the Supreme Court. If only the Court had stayed its hand or decided Roe v."

"The backlash narrative suggests that turning to courts to vindicate rights is too often counter-productive, and that adjudication is to be avoided at all costs. We are not ready to accept this grim diagnosis at face value, and we urge further research into the dynamics of conflict in the decades after Roe. The stakes in understanding this history are high."

"When asked to name a case that the Supreme Court has decided, most Americans who can name one point to Roe v. Wade —a case that they are eight times more likely to name than Brown v. Board of Education. Roe has become nearly synonymous with political conflict. Hearing closing arguments in California’s same-sex marriage case, the presiding judge, Vaughn Walker, worried about provoking backlash and pointed to the Court’s abortion decision, which he suggested had engendered conflict that had “plagued our politics for 30 years.” Like many, Judge Walker attributed political polarization over abortion to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe. David Brooks charges: “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.” Yet few who invoke “Roe rage” have actually examined its roots. What might the conflict over abortion before Roe reveal about the conflict that escalated after the Court ruled?"

"By examining the conflict in the period before the Court ruled, we can see how the abortion conflict changed in meaning, structure, and intensity as it was joined by a successive array of advocates—not only social movements8 and the Catholic Church but also strategists for the Republican Party seeking to attract traditionally Democratic voters in the 1972 presidential campaign. The evidence that we uncover of abortion’s entanglement in party realignment before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe demonstrates that the competition of political parties for voters supplies an independent institutional basis for conflict over abortion. Where proponents of a Court-centered account of backlash offer reasons that adjudication distinctively causes political conflict, the history that we analyze identifies forms of political conflict that could engulf adjudication."

"In the summer before Roe, a newspaper column about a new Gallup poll preserved in Justice Blackmun’s case file reported that sixty-four percent of Americans (and fifty-six percent of Catholics) agreed “with the statement that ‘the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician’”—with “a greater proportion of Republicans (68 per cent) . . . than Democrats (59 per cent) holding the belief that abortion should be a decision between a woman and her physician.”Consistent with these findings, Roe was an opinion written and supported by Justices whom a Republican president had recently appointed. Indeed, it was at the urging of one of Richard Nixon’s most recent appointees, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., that the seven-Justice majority in Roe extended constitutional protection from the first to the second trimester of pregnancy, until the point of fetal viability. To say the least, these legal-political alignments invert contemporary expectations, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion."

"How have we moved from a world in which Republicans led the way in the decriminalization of abortion to one in which Republicans call for the recriminalization of abortion? The backlash narrative conventionally identifies the Supreme Court’s decision as the cause of polarizing conflict and imagines backlash as arising in response to the Court repressing politics. In contrast to this Court-centered account of backlash, the history that we examine shows how conflict over abortion escalated through the interaction of other institutions before the Court ruled. There is now a small but growing body of scholarship questioning whether abortion backlash has been provoked primarily by adjudication. Gene Burns, David Garrow, Scott Lemieux, and Laurence Tribe show that, in the decade before Roe, the enactment of laws liberalizing access to abortion provoked energetic opposition by the Catholic Church. We offer fresh evidence to substantiate these claims, as well as new evidence about conflict before Roe that points to an alternative institutional basis for the political polarization around abortion—the national party system."

"Through sources in our book and in this paper, we demonstrate that the abortion issue was entangled in a struggle over political party alignment before the Supreme Court decided Roe. As repeal of abortion laws became an issue that Catholics opposed and feminists supported, strategists for the Republican Party began to employ arguments about abortion in the campaign for the 1972 presidential election. We show how, in the several years before Roe, strategists for the Republican Party encouraged President Nixon to begin attacking abortion as a way (1) to attract Catholic voters from their historic alignment with the Democratic Party and (2) to attract social conservatives, by tarring George McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 presidential election, as a radical for his associations with youth movements, including feminists seeking ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and “abortion on demand.”16 In reconstructing this episode, we show how strategists for the national political parties had interests in the abortion issue that diverged from single-issue movement actors, and we document some of the bridging narratives that party strategists used to connect the abortion conflict to other controversies."

"[T]he pre-Roe history that we chronicle is significant, among other reasons, because it demonstrates the motivations that different actors had for engaging in conflict over abortion at a time when their engagement cannot be construed as a reaction to the Court. As different groups joined and changed the stakes of the abortion conflict, conflict escalated without the intermediation of judicial review. Understanding the dynamics of conflict before Roe changes the questions that we might ask of the record after Roe. The dynamics of conflict before the Court ruled suggest many reasons to explore the role played by nonjudicial actors and institutions in helping make the Supreme Court’s decision notorious as a source of polarization. In particular, it raises the question of how the competition of the national political parties for voters might have shaped reception of the decision. “Roe” is now a shorthand reference for positions staked out in long-running debates over gender, religion, and politics. But is the decision a cause or a symbol of these conflicts? We conclude the paper with a call for scholarly inquiry, in the hope that this history of the abortion conflict before Roe demonstrates why facts matter in any conversation about Roe as an exemplar of the possibilities and limits of judicial review."

"Part III surveys expressions of this “common-sense” understanding in the popular media and the academy, where Roe is regularly invoked as the sole and sufficient cause of political polarization around abortion. The history of abortion conflict in the years before Roe offers a rich counterpoint as it illustrates motives for conflict emanating from institutions other than the Court. Attuned to these alternative institutional bases for conflict over abortion, we can pick out features of the post-Roe landscape that raise deep questions about the sufficiency of Court-centered accounts of backlash and confront a series of puzzles about the institutions and actors that have helped make Roe matter as it has. Of course, no history of the pre-Roe period can settle the story of Roe’s reception. But it can unsettle that story, as our history does. If we are to better understand Roe’s role in causing political polarization, we need a history that attends to the different institutions that distinctively contributed to the abortion conflict—including the national political parties in a realignment contest. Only with such history can we look to Roe to teach us about the prospects and limits of judicial review."

"That the major political parties have decisively changed positions on abortion is clear. On the eve of Roe, as we have noted, the Gallup Poll reported that a sizeable majority of all Americans—by 64% to 31%—agreed with the statement that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician”; 68% of Republicans supported that categorical statement compared with 58% of Democrats. Today, of course, it is the Republican Party that opposes constitutional protections for abortion, and the Democratic Party that supports them."

"pp.299-300"

"Polarization of the national parties over abortion did not appear at the time of Roe but took shape years after. While party platforms began to diverge on abortion in the 1970s, it took years after Roe for Republicans to vote more consistently against abortion than Democrats, a shift that seems to have begun with party leaders and then spread to its base. Greg Adams, examining abortion-related votes in Congress from 1973 through 1994 as a measure of the abortion views of the political system’s elites, concluded that it was not until 1979 (perhaps not coincidentally, at the same time Weyrich and Viguerie organized pro-life PACs) that congressional Republicans began to vote against abortion at a higher rate than Democrats in Congress."

"In this Part, we survey commentary in the academy and popular press that attributes escalating conflict over abortion to the Court’s decision in Roe. The “Roe-caused-backlash” narrative has acquired a life of its own, such that those who invoke it scarcely look to history."

"Accounts of abortion backlash differ in the particular failings that they ascribe to the Supreme Court, but the assumption that binds them together is that it was the Court’s decision in Roe that began conflict over abortion. As Ken I. Kersch, director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, explains, “Politically, the Court’s decision to declare abortion to be a national right served as a catalyst for the Right to Life movement. That movement, in turn, played a major role in realigning the party loyalties of millions of Americans.”"

"[F]ar from reconciling abortion opponents to a woman’s fundamental right to terminate her pregnancy, the decision actually spawned a right-to-life opposition which did not previously exist."

"It is also commonly asserted that the Court caused conflict because it rendered a decision that diverged from popular opinion. Jeffrey Rosen, for example, contrasts Roe with Brown, which he asserts “was supported by more than half of the country when it was handed down . . . [while] Roe v. Wade was an entirely different matter. The Court’s decision, in 1973, to strike down abortion laws in forty-six states and the District of Columbia was high-handed, and represents one of the few times that the Court leaped ahead of a national consensus.” Jeffrey Rosen, The Day After Roe, THE ATLANTIC, June 2006, at 56, 56-57. Rosen also contends that the Court could have avoided backlash if only it had limited its holding to the termination of early pregnancies. Jeffrey Rosen, The Supreme Court: Judicial Temperament and the Democratic Ideal, 47 WASHBURN L.J. 1, 8 (2007) (“The parts of Roe that provoked a backlash were those that called into question later term restrictions that most Americans support.”). Historical evidence does not suggest that a more temporally limited abortion right would have been acceptable to the antiabortion movement at the time of Roe. The fervent minority who entered politics to work against abortion rights before and after Roe sought criminalization and were not willing to settle for less. To those who believe that abortion is murder, there is no middle ground; it makes no difference whether a judicial or legislative decision permits abortion up to twelve weeks’ gestation or twenty. That is why the Catholic Church began to organize at the national level to block abortion reform when the only reform on offer was the ALI therapeutic legislation. see supra notes 66-79 and accompanying text; see also Eugene Quay, Justifiable Abortion—Medical and Legal Foundations, 49 GEO. L.J. 173, 173 (1960) (attacking, from a Catholic perspective, the abortion provisions of the proposed Model Penal Code, recently tentatively approved by the ALI, and describing the proposal as “a violent departure from all existing laws”)."

"Not only is it commonly assumed that Roe started the conflict over abortion but the common assumption, both outside and within the legal academy, is that Roe has driven the realignment of Republican and Democratic voters around abortion. According to Benjamin Wittes, “One effect of Roe was to mobilize a permanent constituency for criminalizing abortion—a constituency that has driven much of the southern realignment toward conservatism.” As Cass Sunstein put it, “[T]he decision may well have created the Moral Majority, helped defeat the equal rights amendment, and undermined the women’s movement by spurring opposition and demobilizing potential adherents.” Or as Sandford Levinson explains, “I have often referred to Roe as ‘the gift that keeps on giving’ inasmuch as it has served to send many, good, decent, committed largely (though certainly not exclusively) working-class voters into the arms of a party that works systematically against their material interests but is willing to pander to their serious value commitment to a ‘right to life.’” David Brooks charges yet more harshly: “Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since.” Robert P. George invokes Roe in warning the Supreme Court not to accept the constitutional claim for same-sex marriage: “By short-circuiting the democratic process, Roe inflamed the culture war that has divided our nation and polarized our politics.”"

"Roe not only is believed by many to have ignited conflict over abortion but also is commonly represented as having single-handedly caused societal polarization and party realignment around the question of abortion. Backlash narratives about Roe thus rest both on temporal assumptions (that conflict over abortion and polarization began with Roe) and on institutional assumptions (that the Supreme Court decision caused the abortion conflict, societal polarization, and party realignment). Those who claim that the Court caused the abortion conflict in fact offer different accounts of why the Court’s decision had such powerful effects on the nation’s politics. They assert that Roe caused backlash because the decision nationalized conflict, because the Court was too far ahead of public opinion,163 or because the decision prevented compromise. The premise on which all of these accounts rest is that bad judicial decisionmaking—whatever the opinion’s precise flaws—caused bad politics. Escalating conflict is a symbol of a politics deformed by judicial overreaching."

"See William n. Eskridge, Jr., Pluralism and Distrust: How Courts Can Support Democracy by Lowering the Stakes of Politics, 114 YALE L.J. 1279, 1312 (2005) (“Roe essentially declared a winner in one of the most difficult and divisive public law debates of American history. Don’t bother going to state legislatures to reverse that decision. Don’t bother trying to persuade your neighbors (unless your neighbor is Justice Powell).”); Michael Klarman, Fidelity, Indeterminacy, and the Problem of Constitutional Evil, 65 FORDHAM l. REV. 1739, 1751 (1997) (describing the “conventional understanding of Roe v. Wade” as being that, “far from reconciling abortion opponents to a woman’s fundamental right to terminate her pregnancy, the decision actually spawned a right-to-life opposition which did not previously exist”)."

"The underlying assumption is that the Court blundered by issuing a decision that shut down politics, short-circuiting a process of democratic-based legislative change that would have been accorded more legitimacy, even by those members of the public who disagreed with it. In What’s the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank charged that: [Roe] unilaterally quashed the then-nascent debate over abortion, settling the issue by fiat and from the top down. And it cemented forever a stereotype of liberalism as a doctrine of a tiny clique of experts, an unholy combination of doctors and lawyers, of bureaucrats and professionals, securing their “reforms” by judicial command rather than by democratic consensus."

"The assumption that Roe caused backlash by repressing politics is now part of how we reason about courts. It made an appearance in the case challenging the"

"This is a compelling story. We will have a better politics—civil, respectful, compromising—which will reassert itself as soon as the Court withdraws and leaves democracy to work itself pure. Had the Court never enforced its (mistaken?) understanding of the Constitution, we would have civic peace. The power of this story is its power as a story. What is often missing is the kind of fact-based analysis of competing explanations for the abortion conflict that would support it."

"Cf. FRANK, supra note 164, at 121 (invoking “the great abortion controversy, which mobilizes millions but which cannot be put to rest without a supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade”)."

"Critics of Roe frequently assert that Roe disrupted a process of state-by-state legislative compromise on abortion that would have produced general public acceptance of laws liberalizing access to abortion. The case is very far from clear. liberalization efforts seem to have stalled after 1970."

"Why did the abortion debate escalate and become the defining site of political division in the nation? The history of the abortion conflict in the period before Roe raises a variety of questions about Court-centric explanations for Roe rage—and accordingly suggests the need for historical inquiry into the sources of the polarization so often attributed to the decision. While the history of conflict over abortion before Roe cannot tell us what happened after the Court ruled, it can and does raise powerful questions about the logic of polarization in the decades after Roe precisely because it demonstrates how the abortion conflict could accelerate and become entangled in party politics in a period when the abortion conflict cannot be plausibly construed as a response to judicial review. The history of the pre-Roe period thus illustrates the need for a deep history of the post-Roe period if we are to make any reliable judgments about how and why Roe came to be the site of polarizing and identitarian conflict that it now is."