Garrison Keillor got sanded-and-blasted yesterday for suggesting it wouldn’t be so bad if a new ever-more-conservative US Supreme Court decided (aka compromised) on Roe v Wade by sending it back down to the individual States to decide.
Later that same night, President Trump essentially agreed with Keillor at the NBC town hall - reporters thought it was perhaps the ‘deepest’, most thought-out, answer he gave all night.
I had planned earlier yesterday to post my agreement with Keillor but neglected to do so : so let me add my voice now.
The Supreme Court 1973 decision making abortion rights a black and white constitutional issue, rather than a gray political issue, created a new and dangerous fault line in American national politics fully the equal to that of Slavery in the 19th century.
For in practise, year around, day by day, most Americans deal with abortion decisions on a ‘circumstances alter cases’ basis, being neither absolutely for or against abortion in all circumstances.
But by making it a national constitutional issue, at election time, our cousins to the south do tend to become overnight fundamentalists : inalterably for or against abortion in the starkest of black and white terms.
It has led conservatives (and now their liberal counterparts) to essentially abandon politics except to the extent that political winners get to pack courts not with neutral judges but rather judges already zealots - for or against - on the issues they are supposed to view dispassionately.
I think we can look to the Canadian model to see how abortion might have played out in the US.
In practise, regardless of the new federal law, obtaining an abortion in Canada remained dependent on decisions made by individually elected provincial governments and hospital boards.
But unlike an universal and eternal constitutional ruling, it turned out that there was a lot of flexibility in the set-up.
Pro-Choice women (if I can put money aside, which you never really can) were somewhat free, as individuals, to have abortions by going on a visit to another province or another hospital or even by permanently moving to another province.
And as a collectivity, Pro-Choice women could work to elect provincial governments and hospital boards with a different view on abortions. Just as the other side could do likewise.
But the Pro Life side had to face three things that rather took the wind out of their sails.
Unlike a constitutional decision, political decisions can reverse - back and forth - every four years.
It was tiring refighting the same battle over and over - that needn’t happen with a constitutional win.
And political decisions can be nuanced, unlike constitutional ones : instead of simply totally banning or totally freeing abortions, politically crafted abortion policies could capture most voters in the muddled middle -something the inflexible Right to Lifers simply couldn’t bend to.
And most Right to Lifers were fundamentally anti national governments making all the decisions and were very much pro local options.
Great, except that meant that women were free to evade Right to Life decisions made by one province or one hospital board by simply exercising their constitutional right to mobility.
I suspect the same thing would happen in America over time, once again.
We tens to forget the power of mobility rights : the minute they were free to move, blacks voted with their feet ( since they couldn’t vote with their ballots) and left the very racist South for the less racist North - by the millions.
Ditto gays, minorities and immigrants of all sorts : they fled to cities and states where the governments gave them more of what they wanted.
The results were bigger than any election : in fact, they decided elections - or rather, would have, if the American electoral system was fully based on one person one vote, which it definitely is not.
California and Montana are about the same size in area but one has 40x the population and 40x the economic,cultural and political clout of the other.
(Oops - except in the Senate, where each is fully equal. Which is why, totally unlike Canada, American “MPs” are powerless and the Senators have all the power. But I digress.)
One state has all the policies conservatives dream of - the other is more liberal. But which state won the ‘mobility’ wars ?
So relax people, let the states decide on abortions - and lets see how it all plays out.
Not the way conservatives will have hoped is my bet...
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