Deciding, Democratically

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, the civil war that is happening in America over the abortion issue is unfolding in the proper way, democratically. There are other possibilities, of course, ranging from royal decree to violence in the streets to military enforcement of authoritarian rule. And, as everyone knows, abortion has been a major, indeed huge issue in American society for many decades, one which arguably should be resolved once and for all. That is precisely the situation we had with Roe v. Wade. And, as the decades passed, the more time that went by with legalized abortion, the greater the tendency to assume that it would always be legal. But the dark forces of conservatism never surrendered, and spent fifty years and billions of dollars doggedly working to capture the judicial system sufficiently to allow it, coerce it into overturning Roe, and once again rendering abortion a criminal act in these United States. That holy crusade, to recriminalize all abortion, was partly why Trump was elected. Always available to the highest bidder, Trump came through with three far right wing extremist ideologues which the Republicans forced onto the high court. One fact is quite clear; if the American people vote on it, state by state, abortion will be legal in every state in the union. That is exactly what the pro choice movement is attempting to do, with some degree of success. Abortion rights are now engraved in stone in the state constitutions of Kansas and Ohio, of all places. More states already have or soon will follow suit. Eventually, abortion rights will quite likely be in every state constitution in America, if not the federal one. Whereas the pro choice and pro life movements are pretty evenly split nationally, a definite majority of Americans believe that women should have some choice, within reason, well regulated, and that abortion should not be entirely banned. This is evident in both surveys and ballot initiatives, such as Kansas and Ohio. The pro life right wing, knowing full well that abortion bans cannot be implemented directly democratically, are resorting to legislative action and the court system, which they continue to try to pack, at the state and local level, with as many hard right extremist judges as possible. In florida, for instance, abortion rights will be on the balot in November. Just recently, however, the legislature passed a law banning it in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy. If the electorate in Florida votes to allow legal abortion for a more reasonbable period of time, which it probablly will, then the restrictive Florida law would, one assumes, become moot, null and void. Through many state legislatures in many red states conservative evangelical extremists are trying to ram through the process and into law crazy laws like; when a sperm cell penetrates and impregnates an egg in the ovary,a human being comes into existence. A sperm and egg cell, fully a human being. All those crazy laws will of course be challenged in court, and we must hope that the courts have not become too conservatively crazy to throw the craziness all out. The two sides of our abortion rights civil war are, as one can see, considerably far apart in viewpoint. But there is, as there almost always is, room for compromise, and if nothing else, at least the issue is being decided, for the most part, nonviolently, peacefully, if clumsily, sluggishly, and inefficiently, in the courtroom and at the balllot box, rather than in the streets.