Preparing for the End of Rowe

The Moral Life Goes On

In a decade of unprecedented things, another unprecedented thing happened: someone leaked a draft opinion of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the case before the Court which may very well be the undoing of abortion access at the national level, and the opening salvo of the fight at various state levels. You can read the leaked draft here. I am no legal scholar, and have no pretense of being one, and thus, won’t presume to weigh in on either the merits of the case, the draft leak, or whether Alito is relying on good precedent. In some ways, if Dobbs upholds the Mississippi statute, and revokes Roe v. Wade and the subsequent ruling of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the relevant question is not whether abortion should be accessible in an on-demand, national manner. If the draft opinion is consistent with the final ruling, then abortion will become a matter for states to determine.

In cities across Texas, the instinct has been increasingly to preemptively declare municipalities as “sanctuary cities for the unborn”. I pitched a story on this movement about three years ago for a national outlet; the story itself didn’t go anywhere, but in the process I was able to interview Mark Lee Dickson, the head of this movement. The thesis of this movement, as I understand it, is to preemptively establish ordinances so that in the event of Rowe being overturned, individual municipalities would be abortion free zones.

It was this interview in particular, and the law which Texas has adopted since then, which soured me not on reducing elective abortions, but on the sanctuary city approach entirely. For the record, I’m not in favor of abortion, nor do I see the case for the precedents to be upheld. I wrote a piece for Comment earlier this year taking a look at Dorothy Day’s approach to the legal framing of abortion, arguing that it makes most sense to see her as opposed to a legal activist philosophy entirely, and to focus on cultivating a culture in which abortion makes no sense.