This is the season of abortion alarm.
On Oct. 2 abortion-rights activists led a Women’s March focusing on “reproductive justice” in some 600 municipalities across the United States. The total number of participants nationwide—in the tens of thousands, according to the march’s spokespeople—was nowhere near the estimated 1 million that the original Women’s March, protesting Donald Trump’s then-brand-new presidency, drew in January 2017.
The protests were carefully timed: the Saturday before the Supreme Court opened its 2021–2022 term on Monday, Oct. 4. On Dec. 1 the court will hear oral argument in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to a 2018 Mississippi law banning most abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The state of Mississippi has asked the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that found a constitutional right to unrestricted abortion up to fetal viability, now about 22 to 24 weeks.
Six of the nine current Supreme Court judges were appointed by Republican presidents, and their conservative judicial philosophies at least raise the possibility of their killing Roe. (Critics both conservative and liberal have maintained that the Supreme Court in Roe pulled the “constitutional right” to abortion out of thin air, as it is nowhere to be found in the Constitution itself.)
Adding to the apprehension is the most draconian of all the recent state abortion restrictions, the Texas Heartbeat Act, which went into effect on Sept. 1 and bans nearly all abortions once cardiac activity is detected in the fetus, usually at six weeks. Courts have struck down other state abortion bans, but the Supreme Court has so far let the Texas law stand because it contains procedural impediments to direct legal challenges by abortion providers. The Biden Justice Department has stepped in, however, and on Oct. 6 a federal judge granted the department’s request for a temporary injunction against enforcement of the Heartbeat Act.
Right now, Biden’s future fate and that of his party seem to hang on the Democrats’ ability to push his $3.5 trillion social-spending package through a sharply divided Congress by the middle of this month—a move that could well fail. There’s a strong chance that the Republicans will take back both houses next year.
So abortion rights—and the perceived threat to them from both the Supreme Court and states such as Texas—may well be the ideal distraction for the electorate, especially for politically moderate women who straddle mentally between distaste for killing a helpless human fetus and wanting an out in the event of a crisis pregnancy.
The Women’s March organizers might have had a similar strategy in mind for the Oct. 2 protests. Their website discouraged participants from dressing up in long red cloaks as oppressed “Handmaids” from the television series, and from brandishing coat hangers, symbols of the dangerous amateur abortions in the days when the procedure was banned. Such theatrics, common in Women’s Marches of the recent past, might paint 2021 participants as dangerous eccentrics and alienate the middle-of-the-road women who are likely the most crucial Democratic constituency in these days when the Democrats need every vote they can get to support their flailing agenda.
Joe Biden is going to need help in 2022 and 2024, and some well-publicized hysteria over perceived threats to abortion rights from his opponents may be exactly the help he needs.
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