My thinking with Roe v. Wade is the post-Warren Court was projecting out the next 30 years of our cultural understanding of abortion and jumping to the endpoint.
I think that without the organized anti-abortion movement that would have been an accurate projection.
But that movement came about, and if such a strong movement was not able to effect shifts in policy over 5 decades it would raise questions of popular legitimacy.
Of course, much of the power it drew on was for its effects on the political system as much as any end-point concern with abortion itself: it was about including the rising, labor-unaffiliated middle class of the Sunbelt as evangelicals and marking off a not-already-spoken-for slice of the policy pie for them. It was about doing it in a way that eased tensions with their traditional enemies, Catholics.
Now we see to what extent this coalition outlasts its origins.
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