The New Abortion Prohibition Era

Americans disagree about abortion. This is the understatement of 2022, yet it bears repeating in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June Supreme Court decision that returned abortion policy to state and federal legislatures. Ten states have already banned abortion and another four have prohibited abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which amounts to nearly the same thing.

- By Katherine Mangu-Ward

We already know what happens when governments try to impose prohibitions. We’ve seen it play out in gun control, immigration, sex work, the war on drugs, and other issues where large groups of people want or need something the government tells them they’re not allowed to have. The result is messy, deadly black markets.

The war on drugs has amply demonstrated the lengths to which governments will go to stop prohibited behavior. In the name of recreational drug prohibition, the state locks people up, steals their money, militarizes borders, wages war, and muddies international diplomacy. States abridge the voting rights, Second Amendment rights, and freedom of movement of hundreds of thousands of people associated with the sale and use of illegal drugs.

There is every reason to think that governments will do all this and more when it comes to abortion, which to prolifers represents a much graver threat than mere heroin or escorts. In fact, the drug-war apparatus that is already in place can be smoothly extended to the drugs already used in more than half of the roughly 650,000 abortions that happen in the U.S. annually.

We are entering the new abortion prohibition era, and we must reckon with its true costs.