Playing Politics with the Right to Choose

Nearly one American woman in four will have an abortion…Decades of effort to drive abortion to the margins of medical practice have failed to dislodge it from the mainstream of women’s lives.

For the cynical game they have played with those lives, politicians have not paid a price. Now perhaps they will. Of course, women themselves will pay a heavy price as this new reality sorts itself out, particularly women with low incomes who now make up the majority of abortion patients.

And there’s another price to be paid as justices in the new majority turn to the mission they were selected for. The currency isn’t votes, but something even more important and harder to win back: the institutional legitimacy of the Supreme Court of the United States. There’s no free ride for the court either.

LINDA GREENHOUSE, “The Free Ride May Soon Be Over for Anti-Abortion Politicians“, New York Times, May 20, 2021.