Party Alignments and Abortion after Roe v. Wade

[Agonized-Statism]

So long as there's two sizable voting blocs for which it's seen as an existential issue- fetal lives or women's lives, depending on who you ask- it's going to become a polarizing issue in a two-party system. Definitely not an issue I like to touch. It seems ridiculous to pick birth as an arbitrary magic line for when human rights begin, but then also, why should the fetus have any more value than the mother, especially before it's recognizably developed (which itself could open up its own can of worms about anthropocentrism)? Trouble is, there's really no middle ground you could take- in fact, that makes you a murderer to both sides. The pro-choicers certainly have a point that it's a proxy for the religious right to control society, and that also muddies the waters a lot. There's also pro-choice rhetoric which undeniably, unhelpfully, alienates the other parent. That's a valid concern. On top of all that, you have the sustainability angle- do we need this for the environment, or is this a slippery slope into some insidious population control scheme and we actually need more kids for the demographic deficit?- and the debate over the ethics of giving birth to disabled kids- is not having them mercy or genocide? It's an absolutely radioactive issue, nothing that can just be swept under the rug.

I guess the reason it didn't used to be such an issue is that a federal government powerful enough to enforce one position or the other is a fairly new development- still a pipe dream to think no abortions are going on in red states now, of course- and human rights and lives really weren't valued as much either way until disturbingly recently, both mothers and infants had much higher mortality rates anyway. And then there was that mid-century mentality of not rocking the boat by talking about social issues that persisted among the older crop of voters and politicians well after the 1960s. But by the time Roe v. Wade happened, the parties' positions were baked in by conservative discontent with liberal intellectual dominance in the Democratic Party, and the writing was on the wall about where the conservative Southerners were going back in 1948 at the latest. You'd have to make an alternate history where the Dixiecrats dominated the party in time for the Democrats to capture the conservative backlash to the counterculture, and that would involve preventing the New Deal Coalition.