Rights groups file lawsuits challenging abortion laws in three states

What is of note here is that I think the legislatures overreached in each case. I’m as against prenatal infanticide as anyone, and I’ve also reviewed Guttmacher’s data myself to conclude that outside of big cities (half a million or more) or big university towns (over 30,000 students at least), abortionists simply can’t make ends meet.

That said, the reality is that current precedent says that you can only really restrict abortion after viability (about 23 weeks, not 20), and most abortions fall into the category of fairly minor surgeries like colonoscopies—things that are readily done in outpatient surgical centers. Hence you can’t get away with these outright bans at this point—that will require a Supreme Court that rectifies the error of Roe, more or less one that sees the 4th Amendment as a limitation on search and seizure, and not as a blanket of “privacy” that can be applied to any “consensual” sex act. (that is, after all, the main argument for Roe)

In the meantime, it’s all about winning hearts, and an intermediate step could be to subject all surgical centers to periodic inspections—those were authorized by Pennsylvania law but ignored, and if they’d been done, Kermit Gosnell would have been stopped decades before he was.

Another possibility is the gradual persuasion of even pro-abortion people that they don’t have the right to tax pro-life neighbors for the benefit of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. That, however, might still require jurists who are mature enough to admit that the fact that abortion is legal does not require tax funding to make it available, and also to point out that those who seek medical care with government aid automatically give up some of their choices in where to get that care.