Abortion is legal because Harry Blackmun thought he was the smartest man on the Court and jury-rigged a decision which threw a wrench into reaching a democratic consensus and has led to decades of conflict and an intractable divide in American politics and opinion.

Assuming for a moment that a human life amendment were passed, abortion would be as illegal for those who want people to stay out of their lives and don’t have to justify themselves to anyone.

And whether that amendment were passed by “the ultra-Republican right” or people who believed their next neighbors were Venusians would be irrelevant.

Like the Dredd Scott decision, this hare-brained judicial edict laid the seeds of its own destruction.