Last night, in the hours leading up to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, it seemed abortion was the only topic that the pundits on television could think about. And in nearly all cases, especially in CNN’s panel of Dana Bash and Jeffrey Toobin, you got the impression that the Roe v. Wade decision is an inviolable part of American law, whose revision or repeal would nearly cause the sky to fall in on the American polity.
The thing is, I don’t think is how most people see the issue, especially not if they understand what Roe is and what it does. Even its outright disappearance would not cause abortion to become illegal in most of America. It would send the issue back to state governments, some of which would ban it, some of which would regulate it more strictly, and some of which would do nothing differently. Instead of playing a great game of keep-away with the policies surrounding the most controversial topic of our era, the federal courts would back off and let the people return to democracy and self-governance.
When you ask people honest questions about the effect of Roe being thrown out, you get the answer that I think you’d expect: Abortion really should be an issue for the people to sort out through the democratic processes of their state government, not the domain of a nine-person oligarchy.
Over the weekend, the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List ran a poll of 400 to 500 registered voters in each of several states where incumbent Democratic senators are facing re-election this year. They asked about Kavanaugh too, but the more useful question was this one: “Do you think that the U.S. Supreme Court should decide abortion policy for [Name of State], or do you think abortion policy should be decided by the people of [Name of State] through their elected officials?”
The results: In every state, voters were significantly more likely to say elected officials should set abortion policy than to say the Supreme Court should decide it. In North Dakota, the ratio was 2:1 for settling it democratically.
Even taken with the appropriate grain of salt (it’s a single poll), these responses at least don’t bear out the idea that Roe is beloved, or necessary, let alone an immovable, immutable fixture in American life. Even though the ruling has been in effect for 35 years, most people in these states, at least — including a closely divided state like Florida — think its effects are just plain anti-democratic.
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CORRECTION: This post originally misstated the timing of the poll. It was conducted over the weekend, before Kavanaugh’s nomination.
