The Other Side Of The Culture War

Ross sets up a thought experiment for his pro-choice readers:

I think that liberals interested in imagining their way into the pro-life psyche might start with the kind of alienation that many of them experienced during the Bush years ... then imagine a Supreme Court ruling that wrote a blank check for interrogation into the U.S. Constitution, so that no act of Congress could touch the President's right to torture ... and then further imagine that waterboarding and worse things became a routine, rather than extraordinary, aspect of American counterterrorism and law enforcement efforts over subsequent years and decades.

Allowing, again, for the immense imperfection of the analogy (yes, the government performs torture and merely allows abortion; yes, the number of waterboardings would never, ever approach the number of abortions; and so forth) this is roughly the kind of landscape that pro-lifers have inhabited for thirty-five years: Not only is the law of the land hostile to our convictions, but those convictions are officially deemed beyond the constitutional pale and thus essentially un-American.

The latter point is the most salient, which is why the impact of Roe was so toxic in the long run. But one wonders: would legal first trimester abortion arrived at by democratic processes be less offensive to doctrinaire pro-lifers? They couldn't blame judges then.