Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an excellent house editorial, “The Contradictions of Abortion Polling,” that contests the “conventional wisdom … that the Supreme Court is walking into a gale-force political wind if it overturns Roe v. Wade.” As the editorial argues:
The real contradiction in the polling is Roe, which has become a totem that doesn’t reflect the underlying policy views. Fifty-five percent of Americans tell Gallup that abortion should be generally illegal in the second trimester. Yet a majority say the Supreme Court should keep Roe. That circle can’t be squared, and it probably reflects that many Americans don’t realize what Roe really allows.
In short, “whatever people tell pollsters about Roe as precedent, they can’t get the policy they seem to want until Roe goes and the political debate opens up.”
The editorial also points out how radical the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act (the bill in Congress being pushed by pro-abortion legislators) is:
That bill guarantees abortion access through viability, and through all nine months if a health provider deems the pregnancy a “health” risk…. It also protects sex-selective abortions and undercuts state laws that require parental involvement for minors.
Indeed, that bill is even more extreme—indeed, barbaric—than WSJ’s brief summary suggests.
The Supreme Court’s role, of course, is to get the Constitution right, not to be swayed by the political winds. But anyone who is a confident judge of those winds is fooling himself. As the editorial observes, “How the politics shakes out depends on how the debate and policies go in the states.” And, of course, in the coming election campaigns.