Roe's Birth, and Death

David Brooks editorialized in NYT reported ustice 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, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate. Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

I know of many senators who love their institution, and long for a compromise that will forestall this nuclear exchange. But they feel trapped. If they turn back now, their abortion activists will destroy them. The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.

Steve M blogged No, David, Roe v. Wade isn't why our politics is coarsened and polarized. Our politics is coarsened and polarized because conservatives want vengeance -- for the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, consumerism, and every other liberal change of the twentieth century. And they're not too thrilled about more recent developments, either -- overturning Roe isn't going to make them mellow out about gay marriage or embryonic stem-cell research or self-administered emergency contraception or laws that permit the removal of feeding tubes for patients in permanent vegetative states. Maybe you just focus on abortion because it's the rare issue on which liberals and Democrats fight back.

George W Bush is the first President that ALLOWED federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, he just limited it to a number of stem cell lines, and did nothing about State or Private sponsored research. And not all conservatives agreed with the action that was taken regarding Terri Schivo

Barbara O'Brien blogged There is no compromising with the Fetus People. I suspect that even if their entire agenda were enacted into law, and all reproduction rights organizations were to disband, it would still not satisfy them. The next step would be to make it a crime to even speak in favor of abortion rights, and then birth control would be criminal. And then on to burkhas. Their fevered obsession with controlling women won't stop with banning abortion.

It would be nice to find someone on the Extreme Left that was interested in a compromise, but clearly if Barbara is going to refer to Right to Life supporters as Fetus People, she isn't interested in compromise

Edward blogged But listen to a "Culture of Lifer" and you'd get the distinct impression that somehow a minority group of elitists is imposing their views on a hapless majority. Brooks uses his wobbly logic to then argue that the country will never have domestic tranquility until Roe v. Wade is overturned and the states legislate the issue individually.

The handfull of elitists are the USSC Judges that took it out of the hands of state legislatures and created a right to an abortion.

Juan Non-Volokh blogged It is also important to note that overturning Roe, by itself, would not be a pro-life victory. All it would accomplish is returning abortion policy to the states, many of which would never severely restrict, let alone prohibit, the practice.

That may be true, but at least the decision would be made by elected representatives and elected Governors, and that would be a LOT better than unelected judges making the decision.