My latest column in the New York Post on how Roe made our current political moment:
Roe was a legal mistake that played a large role in driving our national politics crazy. Now the democratic process gets to decide what happens to abortion. Before Roe, nearly every state in the Union banned or restricted abortion, but the trend was toward allowing abortion in more situations. That trend, here and abroad, tracked the liberalizing of divorce laws and other features of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Roe stopped all that in its tracks, high-handedly sweeping off the books the laws of nearly every state at once. (New York’s law, the nation’s most permissive, allowed abortions up to 24 weeks.) The Supreme Court’s job is to read the law, not write it. Nothing in the Constitution mentions abortion even indirectly, and nobody before the 1970s thought the Constitution made abortion legal. . . .
All the energy that usually goes into politics and lawmaking in Congress and state legislatures was forced into an all-or-nothing national battle for the Supreme Court that lasted decades. When presidential candidates such as Donald Trump or Bill Clinton misbehaved, their supporters insisted that the stakes of every presidential election were too high for dissent, because Roe was always on the national ballot. That isn’t healthy. In America, the people are supposed to make the law. Now they can.