I really owe my Substack & Patreon supporters an article on this, but it's complicated. I'm going to dash off some thoughts and see what kind of feedback it gets (or lack thereof, which is also feedback).
In my reading, the full opinion in Dobbs starts out insane and gets more insane on the merits.
The critical flawed assumptions are a primitive conflation between embryos and fetuses and human beings, which is objectively disprovable, and a decision to respect a long-standing American legal tradition of state regulation of abortion, but not stare decisis on that exact same question.
I have looked at the Times' annotations, and the Post's; I think the Post's are more helpful.
Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed is quoted on WGBH’s site with an eminently readable and very brief legal history of abortion, as well as discussing the legal strategy behind Roe and the relevant lawyers who actually took it through the court system up to the Supreme Court.
A legal history is slightly less useful anyway as opposed to a political history.
The anti-choice movement as it exists today, as a fundraising and anger-farming vehicle for the evangelical right, is old, in terms of our lifetimes, easily going back to the '80s, but it's novel historically speaking.
It was not always so. The kinds of forces that are aligned with the anti-choice movement today, including insurrectionists, hard-right extremists, Christian nationalists, and Trumpers in general, came about as the result of a series of calculated strategies with traceable decisions and outcomes of those decisions.
HCR calls this "movement conservatism", and I think her statement of the thesis is as cogent a one as exists. The Guardian supplies a restatement of the thesis, citing additional historians who make the argument like Cox Richardson.
I think a full impact assessment of "what the fuck just happened", as we used to say back in 2017, has to include what this is doing to institutional integrity as a safeguard against fascism. The answer there is, nothing good.
Philip Bump makes the argument, in the Post, that rising illiberalism - including restrictions on abortion - precede lower "democracy scores", or ratings on the efficacy of democratic institutions, in Poland, Nicaragua and the United States, while also noting the long-standing ties between fascism and misogyny, as well as between minorities in power and anti-majoritarian policies; these are sound arguments, in my opinion.
We will see, from polling in the next few days, how bad the damage is, but I am willing to go out on a limb and say, I think there’s a lot fewer people who believe in supposedly impartial institutions like the court system in America than there used to be.
This is exacerbated somewhat by the Biden administration’s reported lack of enthusiasm for court expansion or elimination of the filibuster.
From the perspective of citizen stewardship of American civic institutions, never mind the uphill political struggle ahead of us given trigger laws and preset Republican messaging and disinformation plays afoot, the implications are somewhat alarming.
I think that’s the core issue at play here: either we’re going to need a clear path forward to reversing a horrifically unpopular and illogical minoritarian Federal policy, or we’re going to have to move forward with severely compromised institutions and social systems - court systems, law enforcement, government, social support, health care, even.
I don’t have the privilege of just saying “oh well I don’t like it here, let’s just give up and leave the country”. A lot of people don’t.
So I vastly prefer that first option.