The Anti-Abortionists' Success May Be Their Undoing

Forcing a minority group's morality onto others is wrought with the possibility the majority will at some point say "enough" and rebel against what they believe to be an attack on their personal freedom and right to privacy.  It's a lesson evangelicals and Opus Dei Catholics may soon learn if the history of Prohibition is an example.  If the extremist majority on the Supreme Court is foolish enought to try to abolish other rights to privacy - e.g., contraception - the revolt may come all the quicker and candidates for federal political office might soon add a plank toreform or enlarge the court to their campaigns.  A column in the New York Times by a historian looks at how anti-abortionists victory in the Dobbs ruling may soon work against them and galvanize the majority of Americans to demand that an extreme minority not be allowed to control their lives.  Here are column highlights:

A movement that seeks to compel Americans to live according to a stringent moral code may be most vulnerable when it succeeds.

For more than half a century, anti-abortion activists, most of whom were or are either conservative Catholics or evangelical Protestants, lobbied state legislatures and Congress, held prayer vigils and mass demonstrations, and recruited a dedicated regiment of lawyers and judges to advance their cause. “This is a great day for preborn children and their mothers,” declared the National Right to Life Committee in June after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, hailing “the work of millions” of citizens who carried its message “into every nook, cranny and corner of America for decades.”

Now that movement has a new and more difficult task: to press its allies in state governments and the courts to enact and enforce new abortion restrictions and to persuade the public to accept the criminalization of what a majority of Americans have long said should be legal.

A century ago, another mass movement, also driven by religious zeal, faced a similar challenge — and utterly failed to overcome it. In 1919, the amendment to prohibit the sale and manufacture of alcohol became part of the Constitution.

Millions of Americans in the “dry army” celebrated what they believed was the culmination of a crusade that burned to outlaw what was one of the largest and most ubiquitous consumer industries in the land. The evangelist Billy Sunday exulted: “The reign of tears is over. … Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

Dry factions bloomed in both major parties, although Republicans were more solidly united behind the idea than Democrats. By the time Congress passed the 18th amendment, prohibition was the law in nearly half the states; 17 had done the deed by popular vote.

Yet the vigor of enforcement seldom matched the movement’s crusading fervor. Kansas passed a dry law in 1880, but illegal saloons known as “blind pigs” operated rather freely in the cities of the state. When the temperance activist Carry A. Nation took to raiding such places, hatchet in hand, she was seeking to embarrass government officials for shirking their duties; they sent her to jail for destroying private property.

She and fellow evangelical Protestants were the soul of the movement, but most Americans of other faiths or none at all regarded prohibition as an assault on their personal liberty. Catholic immigrants who had settled one Iowa county defied the law, egged on by their local priest, who let them produce moonshine in the basement of his church. In 1913, Congress enacted a ban on shipping alcoholic beverages into dry states, but the authorities could do little to enforce it.

Once the dry movement got the Constitution on its side, resistance to its mission intensified. Canadian distilleries shipped thousands of cases of whisky across the border. Al Capone and other urban gangsters became fabulously wealthy forcing speakeasies to sell only the alcohol the mob provided. Applauded by many Catholic and Jewish voters, mayors in New York and San Francisco denounced the law — and refused to help effectively enforce it.

Underfinanced, understaffed and often unmotivated police forces could not prevent people from violating the law, . . . .

The prohibitionists thus lost their reputation as a movement of compassionate idealists and got saddled with a new one: allies of a state bureaucracy that lashed out, clumsily, at anyone who did not behave like a devout rural Protestant, a group that included Catholics and Jews, as well as wealthy city dwellers.

With the onset of the Great Depression, the resistance to Prohibition emerged as a political juggernaut. . . . . In 1932, they rallied to the presidential campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who vowed to help speed the end of national prohibition. A year later, Roosevelt happily announced the ratification of the amendment repealing what Herbert Hoover, the president he had defeated in a landslide, had called “the great experiment.”

Of course, the political challenge of stopping abortions will differ from the challenge of abolishing the traffic in alcohol. . . . .Yet, in some ways, the anti-abortion movement after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is actually weaker than was its moralist precursor when prohibition became the law of the land. Nearly 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the Dobbs decision. And while many conservative Christians of all denominations think abortion is sinful, they no longer command public opinion as did evangelicals a little over a century ago. . . . . And young women, vital foot soldiers in the bygone dry army, now overwhelmingly oppose the judicial and legislative effort to police their wombs.

Republicans like Mike Pence may vow to outlaw abortion everywhere, but to enforce a national ban would require a very different citizenry than the one that inhabits 21st-century America. . . . . Stories of teenagers forced to bear children that resulted from rape and of health workers jailed for helping desperate poor women end their pregnancies could soon make the anti-abortion movement seem more sadistic than virtuous.

Today, if the history of prohibition is any guide, the public will quickly turn hostile when activists with decent motives elect officials (or appoint judges) who carry out indecent and unenforceable assaults on individual freedom. In the end, most Americans will rebel against authorities who decree what they can do with their own bodies.