This isn't the first time a right has been withdrawn.
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.
Prohibition was unevenly enforced. I am a member of a hundred-year-old private University Club. Alcohol was available there during prohibition for educated gentlemen. Uneven enforcement brought cynicism and disrespect for the law. Abortion bans will bring the same result. Actions that are a felony in one place will be practiced openly across a state line. There is no moral clarity underlying the law. This will fuel cynicism.
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.
Well thought out, as ever. Will the focus on abortion rights, as salient as they are, distract us from the perhaps larger issue of the Court's subverting of federal authority?
I was thinking of this parallel on Saturday - spot on!