We did it with prohibition.
This, too, will work out badly.
Birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
In Spain, the best upper sets do it
Lithuanians and Letts do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Cole Porter
People do it. Accidents happen. Ask an insurance actuary. Ask a 21-year old sophomore in college staring at the home pregnancy test.
In 1919 Americans understood that alcohol caused harm, and believed we would all be better off if Americans didn’t drink. We wanted to clean up our county. We especially wanted to stop those other people who abused alcohol. The conservative churches were cheerleaders for temperance and prohibition. They were an organized minority. Prohibition passed. It was God’s will.
Prohibition was built on a foundation of hypocrisy. Banning alcohol would bring some discipline to those "lower sorts of people." Black drinkers. Catholics from Ireland with their whisky. Catholics from southern Europe with their wine. German-speaking immigrants with their beer. The people who passed the laws knew they had their own personal escape hatch. They had a supply saved, or could buy with a friendly-doctor’s prescription, or could make it themselves, or buy it on the black market. Drinking went underground. There was as much drinking as ever, but it was uncontrolled and lawless.
No one in an American state legislature has any genuine fear that the abortion bans would keep themselves or loved ones from getting in vitro fertilization or an abortion if they really wanted or needed one. The Supreme Court decisions allows states to ban abortion and many have immediately done so. More state bans are in the works. Banning abortion is a statement of principle, not of practical prohibition. It is virtue signaling and slut shaming. Abortion bans are a way for traditional-values-Americans to send a message of triumph against "Hollywood-values" in all its modern manifestations. Hypocrisy makes this an easy message.
Prohibition will drive abortion underground. People made their own beer, wine, and spirits, and sometimes poisoned themselves. Women will attempt their own abortions again, or delay travel to an abortion facility, hoping nature will end the pregnancy on its own. Outcomes will be worse and sometimes fatal.
Accidents happen. A theme of this blog, informed by my 30-year career as a financial advisor, is that people experience the pain of loss at five times the intensity that they experience missed opportunity for gain. Abortion bans are loss. People won't accept that loss, not when there is something so life-altering as an unwanted pregnancy. So we will have the Prohibition result. All but the poorest and most vulnerable people will circumvent the law. The abortion environment will be characterized by cynicism.
I do not expect America to be going into a new long-term status quo of abortion-free states. It will resolve itself back into an era of generally available safe, legal, and rare abortions. But first we have to go through a decade of self-imposed chaos. Republicans will get blamed for the mess.
9 comments:
The Prohibition comparison has some parallels, but it's not accurate in one important area:
This is oppression, based on misogyny, of one specific group-WOMEN.
There are societal implications that go far beyond criminalizing abortion that Prohibition never touched, but there is one common theme:
Religious zealots who seek to impose their will on the larger society, and politicians who pander to them.
Localities and states had already prohibited alcohol in many cases, well before the Amendment. The big push did come amid deep anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-urban fervor. But it was the new, cheap availability of hard liquor and its practically fatal consequences that forged the "winning" argument. There was some shock that Prohibition, in the end, encompassed wine and beer; not just the lethal hard stuff. That doomed it. Today, I think, the Republicans must feel like the dog that caught the bus; like, what now? Raging against abortion was such a winning argument for these new Republicans but dealing with its reality? Very unexpected and threatening to their ultimate survival. My hope is this new Supreme Court will shock legislatures into the action they were created to take; to do the job they are supposed to do. For too long, voters and law-makers have been depending on a friendly Supreme Court to bail them out of their shirking; no more.
Untrammeled abortion access never was a right that was withdrawn, at least per the now-standing SCOTUS holding on what the Constitution requires versus actually never did require, or forbade all along. It was simply legal for a goodly period, which is not the same thing. Like segregated schools and public accommodations, even smoking on planes or in restaurants and bars. Slavery itself, then separate-but-equal, etc. never really were Constitutional rights through this prism arguably of Comtean positivismm. What's legal, rules.
"Cynicism" for the law, amid an untidy patchwork of competing social priorities and contradictory results, abounds also with full leftist support, e.g. with sanctuary jurisdictions according protections and benefits to illegal immigrants, or with various forms of affirmative action quotas and set-asides defying modern legal precedent, most notably in higher education. Meanwhile, had they the means, the same leftists would gladly abrogate much or all of the Second Amendment, which provides explicit protection for gun owners.
Ox, gored, whose. T'was ever so.
Sometimes the need for an abortion couldn’t be more obvious, and sometimes it’s not. SCOTUS ruled the states should decide, but do we really want politicians deciding what medical procedures should be available to women?
According to Supreme Court reasoning, abortion isn’t a right because it isn’t mentioned in the Constitution. Neither are AR-15s. If they're going by the intent of the Founding Fathers, the only arms people have a right to are those the Founding Fathers were familiar with - flintlocks and muzzle loaders.
A quick note on Rick’s post:
In a higher education setting, his post would be considered transferbook because it does not acknowledge the existence of “men” who can become pregnant.
Transfer book? Men who can become pregnant?
A guy I knew had an idea he thought was pregnant with possibilities, but it turned out to be gas.
That should’ve been “transphobic.” Stupid voice recognition…
It's rare enough for the Supreme Court to overturn a precedent, but this is the first time the court has revoked a right. So much for Republicans' self-proclaimed commitment to our freedoms.
Here's an idea: Democrats propose FREE abortions to all "people of color." That might turn the Republicans around....
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