Overturning Roe v. Wade Does Change Everything

PART 1 OF 2

If you own a fainting couch, now might be a good time to list it for sale. Given the pearl-clutching panic currently on display among the pro-abortion crowd, you should make a pretty penny.

Notwithstanding the hysteria that has ensued in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson rulingeffectively overturning Roe v. Wade, not much has changed. Abortion is still widely available in this country and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Dobbs has not banned abortion in the United States, only given it to the states to regulate as they see fit.

Still, perhaps the Chicken Littles are on to something. Let’s briefly consider what did and didn’t change when the court handed down its decision on June 24.

What Dobbs Didn’t Change

If you want an abortion in this country, you can get one. Yes, trigger laws have led to more than a dozen states either banning abortion or beginning the process of doing so.

But even if you live in one of those states, the pro-abort contingent is rushing to make sure you are aware of all the ways you can still obtain an abortion: by traveling to a state where it is allowed, by ordering abortion pills from an online pharmacy, or by purchasing them from an overseas provider. And companies like Amazon and Citigroup have promised to help their employees who want abortions to get them. It helps their bottom line, after all.

But more important than the ongoing availability of abortion is the continuing desire of women to obtain them. One Supreme Court case doesn’t alter people’s beliefs, nor does it change their hearts. As long as there are women who want to get abortions (and men who pressure them into it), the scourge of abortion will remain.

What Dobbs Did Change

Why, then, the celebration? If abortion is still with us, why are those in the pro-life cause so jubilant?

Because while in one sense, nothing has changed — not the basic availability of abortion in the United States, the hearts and minds of those who promote and seek it, or the greed of those who will provide it — in another sense, everything has changed. No longer is the United States a country where abortion on demand is the default. No longer is the federal government in the express business of advocating for the “right” of a woman to have an abortion while ignoring the right of the child in the womb to live.

“Roe’s defenders characterize the abortion right as similar to the rights recognized in past decisions,” the opinion explained, “but abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged, because it destroys what those decisions called ‘fetal life’ and what the law now before us describes as an ‘unborn human being.’”

The Supreme Court’s refusal in Dobbs v. Jackson to continue a 50-year-old policy of preventing states from regulating abortion as they see fit is not going to lead to an immediate and wholesale change in the way Americans view abortion. But history shows that governments do affect the way people live….

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/05/overturning-roe-v-wade-changes-everything-just-not-in-the-ways-corporate-media-claim/