panic. And rightly so.
Abortion on demand is the sine qua non of progressivism. Without a significant sector of society empowered to choose, arbitrarily, the death of another helpless human being, all the rest of their utopian goals — income redistribution, socialized medicine, gun confiscation, sex-reassignments for 8-year-olds, dissent criminalized, the Green New Deal, race-based decision making, you name it – are all worthless. If the killing can’t continue, what’s the point of anything?
… Both slavery and abortion could only exist if Americans were willing to allow a particular class of humans can be deprived of all their fundamental rights: African blacks in the case of slavery, any unborn child in the case of abortion. In the early days, both institutions were tolerated as “necessary evils.” Eventually, defenders were praising both of them as positive goods.
… Legalized abortion after Roe has followed the same progress, except, so far, to a civil war. In the early days abortion was defended as a necessary evil: “Don’t say we’re pro-abortion,” they complained. “We don’t like abortions. It’s just for these rare, tragic, problem situations like 13-year-old rape victims and women who’ll die if they give birth. There’s simply no other solution!”
… The Left is terrified of the outcome of Dobbs because, without being able to throw down, as the last word that silences every moral, social, or medical argument against abortion, that the “fundamental right to abortion is the law of the land,” they’ll have to actually have those arguments. And win them. For half a century, those arguments are exactly what Roe has saved them from. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v Wade, it becomes a question of good and evil again. And they know they’re not ready for it.