Anti-Roe "Contrarianism": Still Wrong

As anyone with a passing familiarity with the nation’s op-ed pages or center-left political publications is aware, there is a cottage industry of affluent white men in liberal urban centers asserting that reproductive freedom would be much better off if states and Congress had the unlimited power to regulate abortion. Since such “contrarian” arguments have the unfortunate drawback of being baldly erroneous, a second cottage industry has emerged: trying to restate these arguments in terms that might be defensible to someone who actually cares about reproductive freedom and knows what they’re talking about. I recently pointed out that if one were to use the same empirical standards for evaluating Roe v. Wade that Ben Wittes does for his beloved Bush v. Gore, you will find that far from having a “legitimacy problem” Roe is broadly popular. In comments, Alon Levy argues that this is misleading:

Just asking about Roe in general yields big majorities for. Asking concrete questions about when and for which reasons abortion should be available regularly yields responses that are significantly more restrictive than what Roe permits.

Questions that ignore Roe but instead ask about whether abortion should be “subject to greater restrictions than it is now” regularly get large majorities for greater restrictions.

This is true enough as far as it goes–public opinion on abortion is more contradictory and ambivalent than general polls on Roe reflect. (However, how these ambivalences cut depend on what information is provided; questions like “The Supreme Court has held that states can regulate abortion in almost any way they see fit short of a ban–is this too restrictive?” or “Ben Wittes and William Saletan argue that rich women in urban centers should be able to get abortions for any reason, and poor women in many states should not be able to obtain abortions for any reason but the life of the mother. Do you agree?” would yield rather less favorable answers for pro-criminalization and “centrist” positions than the questions Alon cites.) The problem is that this is precisely the opposite of what Wittes argues. Wittes, you’ll remember, believes that public opinion is enormously supportive of abortion rights (which, combined with his bizarrely naive conception of how legislative power functions, produces his ludicrously Pollyanish predictions about a world without Roe) but is very hostile to Roe. This is simply false. Moreover, given that Wittes is committed to the (farcical) claim that public opposition to Roe stems from people’s careful consideration of its legal craftsmanship, he’s not really in a position to argue that many people don’t even understand its holding (although, myself, I have no doubt that this is true.) Wittes’ famous article is simply nonsense all the way down, and as the double standard he employs when discussing the conservative decisions he likes makes clear his commitment to taking the Republican side in legal and political disputes is considerably strongly than his nominal commitment to reproductive freedom.