digamma.net - notes

Garance Franke-Ruta gets the history of American abortion policy very wrong:

Abortion is legal in America, not because of the wisdom and fairness of its judges or righteousness of its politicians; it’s legal because thousands – millions – of women worked for decades to challenge their partners, their families, their elected representatives, and society as a whole about the wisdom of keeping it illegal. Countless hours and sleepless nights and marches and arrests and speeches went into that work; endless conferences and fundraising efforts and legal challenges undergirded it. It was not an easy accomplishment.

This is false. Those are the reasons abortion is legal in Europe. Abortion is legal in America because the Supreme Court said so.

Looking at some other movements for social change, it took 82 year of fighting for women to get the vote in this country,

This is true. Those 82 years were spent winning battle after battle in state legislatures, and finally getting 3/4 of them to ratify an amendment to the Constitution.

and more than 70 years for abolitionists to win their battle to outlaw slavery (not to mention a civil war).

You can take issue with a lot of what the federal government did in the name of abolishing slavery, and I do, but Lincoln and the Republicans were still elected democratically.

The difference here is critical. When a group loses an election fair and square, they can moan, but they know they had their shot. When a group gets their chosen policies overruled by an extremely questionable court decision, justified more on its outcome (back alleys! coathangers!) than on any Constitutional language, they’ve been disenfranchised.

Certainly courts have to override majority will from time to time, but I argue - and this is the opposite of Franke-Ruta’s argument - that court decisions are a poor substitute for real social change.