Abortion foes in state legislatures seem awfully sure of themselves lately. The history of the abortion debate suggests, though, that by going as far as these measures do, anti-abortion legislators may have overplayed their hand. Natural law-based arguments for fetal personhood were pursued by anti-abortion scholars and jurists for much of the 1960s and 1970s to little avail. By the early 1980s, abortion foes generally gave up on this strategy. After all, conservatives had long invoked the specter of judicial activism in criticizing their liberal colleagues, including those who issued the Roe decision.

Source: New York Times May 15, 2019 23:03 UTC