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Roe And The Politics Of Backlash: Countermobilization Against The Courts And Abortion Rights Claiming, Scott E. Lemieux
Roe And The Politics Of Backlash: Countermobilization Against The Courts And Abortion Rights Claiming, Scott E. Lemieux
Scott E Lemieux
Conventional wisdom holds that Roe v. Wade might have been a serious strategic error on the part of the pro-choice movement, as abortion law was being liberalized anyway and the Supreme Court's intervention produced a furious backlash. This paper argues that every element of this argument is erroneous. The drive for liberalization was stalled before 1973 by a very well-organized pro-life movement, and both the American and Canadian cases suggest that judicial opinions do not produce any more backlash than commensurate legislative policy changes.