About that Dobbs opinion — I’ll believe it when I see it.

The little devil who sits on my left shoulder has been enjoying the hyperventilating a bit too much. But I think he has calmed down overnight. Being a conservative, I am more closely connected to our crazies than to the other side’s crazies, but have a look at the discussion on Twitter right now, and you’ll get a good ugly look at how crazy their crazies are. “Crazy” doesn’t really do it.

That being said, there is no cause for hyperventilation on either side.

If the opinion ends up saying what it is says in the Politico report, then all that will do is confirm what many people — including many intellectually honest pro-choice legal scholars — have understood for a long, long time: that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided, that there is simply nothing in the Constitution that empowered the Court to supplant the democratic lawmaking process in this matter, and that the lawmaking will return to the lawmakers.

The pro-abortion side will be disappointed at first with its symbolic loss, but it is very likely that the state legislatures in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, etc., will pass laws that secure abortion rights on those states. It seems reasonably likely that, for the foreseeable future, most Americans will live in states where abortion remains legal. A few big states, notably Texas, are likely to go the other way. Florida will probably enact some abortion restrictions but probably will not go as far as Texas or Oklahoma. The pro-life side will still have a great deal of work to do.

The needle will move in the direction of abortion restriction some considerable distance, as a result of which U.S. abortion laws will be less like those of China or North Korea and more like those of France or Denmark. The Dobbs case results from a Mississippi abortion law that bans abortion in most cases after 15 weeks of pregnancy; in Norway, the rule is twelve weeks. Progressive Europhilia is highly selective.

And if Roe is indeed overturned, it will go down as a model example of democratic political activism, one that took a tragically long time to succeed but succeeded in the right way, in accordance with the rule of law and our democratic traditions. That project comprehended more than abortion: It has to a considerable degree reformed American jurisprudence by creating institutions such as the Federalist Society and intelligent arguments that are so persuasive and now so embedded in our political culture that even Ketanji Brown Jackson felt compelled to pretend to be an originalist at her confirmation hearings. That will continue to bear fruit for a long time.