Certainly “some” women got abortions. Some got them in “back alleys,” some, I suspect a very few” used a coat hanger, and some significant number of better off women got them from their own doctor with the sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” that the rich always have.

I do think the debate would be very different today and it would involve a different population. Lots of movies notwithstanding, sex in high school was anything but the rule in those days; girls under 18 rarely had access to the pill and were deathly afraid of getting pregnant. Boys under 18 had some access to condoms, though not always easy access, and were deathly afraid of shotguns specifically and making girls pregnant generally.

Ms. McCorvey (Roe) is the poster girl for more than abortion. She makes a pretty good poster girl for the breakdown of the family and its results. She was a child of divorce and alcoholism who married the child’s father when she was only 16 and left him while she was pregnant with that child because he was violent towards her. You can find that story most anywhere and at most any economic level today except the marriage part; today they would be unlikely to be married, they’d just be “hooked up” or living together. That was still an uncommon life story in the early ’70s back before half the marriages ended in divorce and the other half in death. In the early ’60s less than 5% of births were to unwed mothers – and that was WITHOUT relatively easily available abortion. Today it is near 40% and that is with over a million abortions a year.

By the ’70s you had the perfect storm of lots of women in the workforce, “no fault” divorce, easy availability of the birth control pill, and a popular culture that was starting to celebrate promiscuity. I remember when “Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door” were showing in name brand theaters in Atlanta and were the talk of the town. These days the act that Deep Throat celebrates isn’t even considered sex by most teenagers.

I “grew up” in the late ’60s and was a long-haired, dope-smoking musician, so I had and took the opportunity to roll around with a fair share of Susie Creamcheesees and Quicksilver Girls. While they were “easy,” they were mostly quite restrained sexually and by the standards of a decade or so later they would have been considered positively dull and uptight. These days high school girls are routinely doing things that only porn stars, and only a few of them, were doing at the time of Roe. And, no, I don’t have first hand experience, but I did just raise two boys through their teenage years and I’ve both talked to them and caught them in flagrante delicto a few times.

So, I don’t know what the discussion would be like today. I think only the AIDS scare has kept abortions from being even more common since AIDS has somewhat increased condom use. That said, people have figured out that if you stay away from junkies and people who hang with junkies, you aren’t likely to get AIDS if you’re a heterosexual, so that ring in the wallet isn’t as common as it once was. Unprotected, both in terms of disease and pregnancy, sex is the rule and the ocassional abortion just seems to be the cost of “doing business” to a large segment of the population. A goodly percentage of the people I know have hustled daughters off to Seattle. Nobody even thinks about the forced marriage anymore and some huge percentage of those white-gowned brides are either pregnant or there’s a baby on grandma’s hip while the bride walks down the aisle.

Anyway, I don’t see how this toothpaste is going back in the tube. The Country has become so sexualized, marriage and family have become so unimportant, and there is so little stigma attached to out-of-wedlock pregnancy or having an abortion that I don’t know what you do if you oppose abortion and the culture that underlies it. I pounded on my daughter and my step kids that an unwanted child would wreck their lives. I never had any issues with my daughter, though I’ll admit that if she had become pregnant while still dependent on me, we’d have been on the next plane to Seattle. I had a few unpleasant conversations with angry parents over some of the boys’ activities, especially the older one who seemed intent on having sex with every living woman to which he was unrelated, but try as we might, Grandma had the baby on her hip while the stepdaughter walked down the aisle. I guess that we should just congratulate ourselves for the fact that she ultimately did get married and even married the kid’s father. She’s even still with him – I think. Actually, she and her kids are here with us right now and I’m not exactly sure when she’s going home and I’m not asking her or her mother any questions, I’ve just been working on my boat and drinking a lot!

The issues that underlie abortion are so deeply ingrained in the culture that if abortion were made illegal, there really would be a surge in illegal and unsafe abortions. If a state were to make abortion illegal, people would wear out the road to the next state where it was legal. Before long, states would be advertising abortion vacations and would become havens like Nevada once was for marriage and divorce and Thailand is for sex with children, well sex generally. Maybe that’s OK as the “federalist” solution, but I can’t think of anything short of Taliban-like measures that are antithetical to American life that would get to the underlying issues.