Now everybody concedes that all this will take a few years. Nobody managing an abortion clinic in South Dakota is about to shut it down. There will be injunctions sought against the new law's enforcement. Both sides have promised to bring money, as required, to mobilize every legal thought, afterthought and presumptive thought, arguing in conflicting directions.
The choicers count five members of the Supreme Court who are publicly committed in favor of Roe v. Wade. They have this fear, that a sitting member of the court will retire in the period immediately ahead, when the incumbent president is still there to nominate a successor. That would mean five votes, counting Roberts and Alito as dormant dissenters from Roe v. Wade, who would, in the nightmare scenario, renounce the 1973 decision as forcefully as the court, in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, renounced the segregation authorized by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
But assume that before the Supreme Court acts, injunctions against the new law fail. Assume, then, that there would be a period in which, in South Dakota, women could not get an abortion. What would they do? Well, of course, there is the alternative that they could bear the child whose life they had brought on. But if that alternative were excluded, what then?
Someone seeking relief could go north to North Dakota, or south to Nebraska. Or east to Minnesota, or west to Wyoming. We are talking about bus rides.
And of course so would it be if Roe were reversed. It is inconceivable that all the states of the union would imitate South Dakota. To demonstrate just how progressive is its vision, the state of Connecticut voted contingently some years ago, that if ever abortion were proscribed elsewhere, pilgrims would be welcome in Connecticut, where abortion rights would be faithfully observed.
We are very much driven, in modern days, by the democratic imperative. Well, the people of South Dakota have expressed themselves on a political question, resolving that unborn life is life notwithstanding. And they hold high what they deem, in their governor's words, their dedication to stand by "the most vulnerable and most helpless persons in our society."