> Men arguing over women's wombs. Love it.

Men and women have similar views on abortion: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p.... Indeed, abortion is one of the political issues with the smallest gender gap in views. Women diverge from men much more on questions like the size of the social safety net. In Mississippi, the State whose law this Supreme Court case is about, the majority of women, and people of all races, oppose abortion.

Abortion advocates are no different than any other kind of progressive advocate--they claim the mantle of an entire group to champion extreme positions that most members of the group don't support, while seeking to suppress the voices of other members of the group. In reality, all the people I know who oppose abortion are women. They're moms, typically religious, and are rarely represented in discussions among educated elites like on HN. (I myself, like most educated elites, support some level of abortion rights, though I find myself favor limiting it to the first trimester, like most Americans.)

The backbone of the pro-life movement is conservative women, just like the backbone of the pro-choice movement is liberal women. Many conservative women--and slightly more women identify as conservative than liberal--deeply care about abortion. Many prioritize abortion more highly than libertarian economics, which is why the impetus for the GOP to take action on abortion has grown as women gain more power in the party. Conservative women almost uniformly love Justice Barrett. Many Republican men, by contrast, (the Justice Roberts type, or the four Republican men who voted to uphold Roe in Casey) would love to drop or at least moderate on abortion to capture more votes in affluent suburbs.

> So this doesn't paint a complete picture. It turns out that 93% of abortions in the U.S. happen at <= 13 weeks gestation. So it's not like we're a country of monsters despite what's technically allowed by Roe.

What the laws "technically allow" are an expression of society's values and sense of morality. Laws create not only legal effects, but social norms. In many cases, the social norms are more important than the legal effect. If we made stealing legal, most people, in the short term, wouldn't steal, because of the strong social norm against it. But over time and generations, we would have normalized stealing.

And even before that, we will have legalized conduct that is immoral and wrong, even if it's rare. by your numbers, you're talking about over 40,000 second trimester abortions a year. Some of which I'm sure would be justified regardless due to fetal deformity or health risks, but you could still be talking about thousands of monstrous acts a year where neither of those factors is implicated.

> And no, I don't think handing it over to the states is workable, any more than it was workable to allow the states to decide segregation, voting rights, contraception, or interracial and gay marriage.

Leaving abortion to legislatures has worked just fine in the rest of the world. Roe was heard within a few years of similar cases in Austria, France, Italy, and Germany, except Germany which found legalized abortion to violate the Basic Law. All of those Courts determined to leave abortion to the legislature. The courts in the EU left same-sex marriage to legislatures as well: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-...

It's fundamentally mistaken to view every social issue through the lens of segregation of Black people. Black people were a minority, brought to the U.S. in slavery, and after they were freed, they were excluded from white society. The white majority had no common bond with the Black minority, and no material interest in their welfare. Segregation laws did not affect, directly or indirectly, the white people who voted for them. Democracy could not operate in this situation.

Contraception, same-sex marriage, and abortion are completely different, because they effect everyone. Women and gay people are uniformly distributed throughout the population. The women who support restrictions on abortion are supporting restrictions on themselves. And the men who support such restrictions will be directly affected if they have to raise an unplanned child. Because the population as a whole has an interest in the outcome, democracy can operate to find a socially acceptable resolution of a contentious issue.

Liberals have used this mistaken analogy to segregation to champion a view of the Supreme Court that wrests control of society's moral and cultural development away from the public and entrusts it to highly educated elites. Abortion is legal to 24 weeks not because the public wants it, but because a bunch of libertarian-leaning Republican judges in the 1970s and 1980s did. Had Roe gone the other way, I strongly suspect we would have reached an equilibrium today that reflects public opinion of supporting elective abortion in the first trimester, but only in exceptional cases after that.