After the leaking of a draft opinion from the Supreme Court on “Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,” it seems clear that the precedent set in Roe v. Wade and upheld by Planned Parenthood v. Casey is being overturned. In the document, confirmed by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito plainly says that the majority opinion is “that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” and that “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”.
So, what does this mean for Abortion “rights”? Despite what liberal pundits’ hysteria makes it look like, this does not mean that abortion is now banned in the entire United States. What it does mean is that the decision on whether it is banned is determined by each state’s government.
Essentially, the power to legislate abortion has been handed from the federal government down to the states in a rare victory for states’ rights. Particularly on an issue that divides Americans more than nearly any other issue.
Forty-nine percent of Americans identify as Pro-Choice and forty-seven percent as Pro-Life. Overall as well, thirty-two percent support abortion being legal in all cases and nineteen percent support abortion being illegal in all cases. Support or lack of it seems correlated to the region the state is in, as Pro-Life states tend to be in the South or Midwest, while pro-choice heavy states are in the Northeast and West coast.
Twenty-three states already have laws that would trigger if the decision is made final that either impose restrictions on abortion they could not previously impose or an outright ban of abortion, all in either the South or Midwest. Conversely, sixteen states have laws that protect the “abortion rights” which are all on the Northeast and West coasts.
The pre-existing divide between more rural, Southern, and Midwestern states and more urban, Northeastern, and West coast states is going to be furthered. The difference in policy, even among states that are generally pro-life or pro-choice, will create a new incentive for people in choosing where they live. One based around a moral issue.
While what set of morals one wants to live under somewhat exists between the states in the varied cultures between them, abortion being a state issue gives an easy signaling device for them. It is a safe assumption that “what is their abortion policy” is a question people will ask when considering where to move.
This is a continuation of the trend of people moving from state to state concentrating certain states on one ideology and culture that is becoming increasingly opposed to other ones. The obvious question that comes from observing this trend is, “Are we going to see secession from this?”
The answer to that question cannot be definitively answered till something happens, but we can draw parallels to the last time the U.S. saw States secede in the Civil War. Historian Alan Taylor describes the U.S. up to 1850 as “built on an unstable foundation of rival regions and an ambiguous Constitution”.
There were many conflicts between the states before the Civil War and even full-on rebellions such as the Whiskey or Shay’s Rebellion. The States only continued the trend of division among themselves leading up to the Civil War culturally, economically, and politically.
Slavery would become the issue that is credited with causing the Civil War, but, while playing a part, was not the only reason, nor does it explain all of the divides between the states. In some states like North Carolina, it was never clear whether the general population even cared about the issue as it was a relatively small slave population state.
Additionally, several Union states kept slavery throughout the war, even after the emancipation proclamation, till it was outlawed by the 13th amendment. Although slavery was not the sole cause of the Civil War, it did become the issue that served as the face of the divide.
Similar conditions do exist today as leading up to the Civil War if you replace the issue of Slavery with the issue of abortion. States before this decision had already been engaged in legal fights with the federal government over abortion. Not only this, several states have made laws to re-enforce “abortion rights” and provide greater access to it.
It is clear that before and now after the leak states are dividing along this line and it is coming to the forefront of the differences between them. Though we can see that many other divides exist between the states that are only being exacerbated, such as COVID 19-policies and approach to the economy.
This provides quite substantial evidence for some kind of situation similar to the Civil War secession or a softer secession such as the USSR. One can only wait, but regardless if such a scenario happens Abortion will be at the forefront of the divide between states for the foreseeable future.
