It's long been a fashionably contrarian opinion that Roe v. Wade was a strategic blunder by the pro-choice movement -- abortion law was liberalizing anyway, so the argument goes, and so all the Supreme Court accomplished was to create a great deal more opposition than would have been the case otherwise. The problem with this argument is that it's false; the pro-life argument was already powerful enough before 1973 to have essentially stopped the liberalization of abortion law at the state level, and arguments that judicial opinions produce more backlash have no empirical support.
To its credit, The New Republic -- one of the most frequent proponents of this myth -- has published a superb review article by Christine Stansell debunking it. Focusing on the evidence presented in a new book by Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, Stansell explains why the conventional wisdom is wrong:
Critics today argue that an incremental strategy would have worked better than Roe. To make that case plausible, you have to look back to the defeated moderates and their state-by-state plan. But as Greenhouse and Siegel show, it was clear well before Roe that their half-a-loaf strategy had run aground. By 1970, twelve states had indeed passed some version of a therapeutic law, but every relaxation of the ban, even the mildest, brought out virulent opposition. That opposition came from a single source: an organizing effort by the Catholic bishops that descended to the parish level. In state after state where change was pending or had passed, Catholic lobbyists and protesters pounced on errant legislators, threatening them with reprisals in the next election. Indeed, the vulnerability of state legislators was a major reason that the repealers wanted to move the action away from the electoral arena to the courts, where Catholics had no overt influence.
The whole essay is very much worth reading.
