Michael Dorf's article darkly warning of a coathanger future seems deeply alarmist to me. Even assuming another pro-choice justice leaves the bench and Roe is overturned, Dorf's scenario, that Congress would pass a national abortion ban and the Supreme Court would uphold it using Raich (the medical marijuana case) as precedent, seems spectacularly unlikely. We're talking Lana Guinier unlikely.
1) There's a solid majority for some form of choice in this country. We're talking 75% of the country lining up behind "always legal" or "sometimes legal", with only 20% turning towards "always illegal". To put another way, more folks believe abortion should be "always legal" than "always illegal". You really think Congress is going to violently enrage 75% of the country?
2) And you think Senate Democrats wouldn't filibuster? Really? Why?
If choice was so maligned that a vast majority of Americans wished it gone, such a dystopia might be worth talking about. Indeed, we'd really have to think about why such an anti-democratic position should remain the law of the land. But choice is not unpopular, we've just let the Christian Right's volume fool us into thinking it is. If horrible things happened on the Supreme Court and Roe flipped, you'd see a variety of state legislatures try to ban abortions, but the federal government wouldn't be involved.
