What did you think would happen when Roe was overturned?

It basically tracked. I was trying to stress to everyone that overturning Roe merely meant that states would administer their own abortion law, and in time have to reckon with the reality of what that meant, and basically everyone here told me to go tuck myself. I’m glad that, though people are undoubtedly hurting as we speak, this issue has been moved into the practical, instead of the endless fights about theory. If we put this issue away again, it will hopefully be with real law, not just the decision of a small panel of judges, not accountable to the people.

I never expected that it would be overturned.

“Did you know or expect that some states had trigger laws that would immediately change abortion law in those states without even a vote or executive order?”
– I think I may have read / heard a little about that, yes.

“Did you expect some states to completely outlaw abortion for any reason?”
– I think some people in some states want to move in that direction. I thought some Bible Belt states might do so, though I expected it to take a while to happen.

“Where were your expectations correct and what has surprised you during this upheaval in abortion law?”
– I’m slightly surprised at how quickly some states have acted, and slight surprised that some of the more Republican-dominated ones haven’t gotten more severe laws more quickly. Maybe they were waiting for the end of this election season?

“I’d like to know if you’re pro-life or pro-choice if you don’t mind sharing that, and also if you are a Democrat or Republican or some other political identification if you are American.”
– I’m entirely pro-choice: I think the law should leave it alone and leave it up to the pregnant woman, and that abortion-related laws should be about protecting the woman’s privacy and freedom, and so would be about preventing and punishing people messing with pregnant women and their personal choices and information.
– I consider myself an independent voter who votes for people who are the best environmental stewards. However the atrociously stupid, undemocratic two-party first-past-the-post US voting system has me usually voting for one of the two “big” party candidates. I almost always end up voting for Democrats over Republicans, based on that and other issues, though that wasn’t so certain before about 2000, when Republicans slid further and further away from anything I would consider acceptable.

While I knew Trump had chosen judges who were antiabortion, I believed they would have trouble turning their opinions into law.
I was wrong. They will violate their oaths to get their way.

The developments are right on script, and for all practical matters precisely as any sensible soul would predict. Did anyone here actually expect alternative outcomes?

@HP I was surprised about the trigger laws. I fully expected laws to tighten though. I’m pleasantly surprised that some pro-life women seem to be very freaked out about no exceptions and fighting back. Maybe they realize they aren’t “pro-life.”

I’m not surprised that when I tell personal stories regarding pregnancy, either my own or a friend, that right wing men accuse me of repeating CNN talking points, and I have to remind them I’m talking about MYSELF and women I personally know in real life. It’s happened more than once. They don’t listen except to their own pre-existing beliefs and their chosen leaders whether they be political leaders, religious, or talking heads on radio and TV.

Did you know that supremacist conspiracy elements are convinced that abortions in the country are a primary feature of the “replacement theory” engineered (of course) by Jews? The story goes that abortion combined with immigration are measures implemented specifically to displace white folks in America. That’s what all that “You will not replace us” bullshit is about.

@HP That doesn’t surprise me. That’s right in line with everything those lunatics accuse others of. Projection is constant. The real winner is the right-wing promoting the idea that Democrats with Planned Parenthood are purposely killing Black babies for eugenics reasons.

I’ve heard that one as well. I even heard it to my great shock from a black man and his wife.

OK, I’ll try again.
I am surprised you were surprised. As early as 2016, before the election, there was a lot of concern expressed about 45 packing SCOTUS with extreme, anti-Roe jurists, and how the states with anti-choice leaning legislatures would go down like dominoes if Roe went down.
I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of states that put the issue to a vote, and how many citizens in some of the more extreme states rebelled against the idea of a loss of women’s bodily autonomy.

Again, I was surprised about the trigger laws. Not that states would change their laws quickly.

@HP the right is trying to get religious Blacks to move to the right.

Okay, background first. I’m pro-choice, but anti-Roe. I don’t think the federal judiciary was ever the right place to resolve abortion politics. It’s an issue for state legislatures.

I did know of trigger laws….they were mostly considered just political publicity stunts as many were passed quite awhile ago when Roe didn’t seem likely to be overturned. At least, that’s how I viewed them.

My prediction was that we would have a period of short term upheaval where radical lefties would want it made legal right up to the last millisecond, and would do things like pay for out of state abortions and such…and radical righties would ban it with no exceptions. However, both sides would gradually discover that this isn’t actually what most voters want.

I think eventually, once the political grandstanding wears off, we’re going to get most states ending up where the EU is. The EU never had a ‘Roe’ type moment. Legislatures made their decisions and they ended up with abortion being legal, but there being a reasonable time limit after which it was illegal. Some more conservative EU nations have time limits that are probably too short, some more liberal ones have time limits that are probably too long. But even these are less extreme than their US counterparts.

I think we’ll end up somewhere in that vicinity. Maybe a couple ultra red states will last longer with zero-abortion policies, and maybe a couple ultra blues will continue with no limits…but most states will end up somewhere in between those extremes. And polls show – that’s where most US voters are and have been for awhile. It’s the vocal extremes that have turned this into a culture war battle. And as long as it was controlled by judicial fiat, there was no pressure relief or compromise possible. Now there is. We just have to endure the blowhards relieving their pressure for awhile before it settles out.

Things have played out pretty much as expected except for the overwhelming support for reproductive rights in various elections.

There was a lot of discussion over the last year about trigger laws and other efforts to completely ban abortions if and when Roe was overturned.

The biggest initial surprise was the vote in Kansas, and then the support for freedom in states that had abortion on the ballot last week.

The good news, I think, is that the voters in a number of states voted down state restrictions to abortion rights, and politicians who support them.

I think that the SC was way out of step with Americans (but in step with the republican right). And there is a difference.

@Entropy And who is actually trying to legalize it up to the last millisecond? I understand the appeal of this “both sides” argument, but while I do see an attempt to ban it outright (with the perfunctory exception to save the life of the mother), I don’t see any state or political movement attempting to legalize it “up to the last millisecond”. That is not even legal here in California, which has the common “viability” limit.

I’m Pro-Life but did not count on trigger laws with no vote by the people of each state.

We did not vote Eric Schmitt out either, still very red.

I thought that we had just taken a major step toward theocracy and that the red states would rejoice and reinforce efforts toward a complete ban in all states.

I did not suppose that public feeling in support of abortion rights would run so high even in Republican strongholds that the issue would tip an election. I did not expect that so many Americans would take the Supreme Court’s betrayal personally and shoulder this problem of childbearing-age women as their own.

I didn’t know about the trigger laws at all. I wonder how many state legislatures will pick up the cue and start reinforcing federal laws with state trigger laws in case SCOTUS abdicates on other protections we trust and rely on.

I didn’t think about it. I knew that it was a bad decision and figured eventually the court would correct itself.

@Jeruba I saw Gov. Whitmer of Michigan in an interview a day ago and she said one of her first orders of business when her new legislature is sworn in is to wipe the books clean of archaic trigger laws in her state. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the basic message. Not just abortion, but all possible issues. Michigan had abortion on the ballot this past vote to add rights to “reproductive freedom” into the constitution and it passed.

NYS History of abortion legislation, cut and pasted from Wikipedia:

On April 10, 1970, the New York Senate passed a law decriminalizing abortion in most cases. Republican Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the bill into law the next day. At the time, New York State was a Republican “trifecta,” meaning both chambers of the legislature and the governorship were Republican-controlled. The 1970 law did several things. First, it added a consent provision requiring a physician to obtain the woman’s consent before performing an abortion. Second, it permitted physician-provided elective abortion services within the first 24-weeks of pregnancy or to preserve her life.Third, it permitted a woman, when acting upon the advice of a duly licensed physician, to perform an “abortional act” on herself within the first 24-weeks of pregnancy or to preserve her life.[16] New York was the second state, after Hawaii, to enact landmark abortion law legislation.
Unlike Hawaii, however, New York’s abortion law did not have a 90-day residency requirement.

Between 1970 and 1973, the New York General Assembly attempted to repeal their law that made abortion legal. Governor Rockefeller successfully vetoed the repeal attempt.

Cities like Baltimore, Austin, and New York passed legislation to require Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) to disclose that they did not offer abortion services, but organizations representing the CPCs have been successful in courts challenging these laws, principally on the argument that forcing the CPCs to post such language violated their First Amendment rights and constituted compelled speech. Whereas the previous attempts at regulating CPCs in Baltimore and other cities were based on having signage that informed the patient that the CPC did not offer abortion-related services, the FACT Act instead makes the patient aware of state-sponsored services that are available, rather than what the CPCs did or did not offer. The law went into effect January 1, 2016. The state legislature was one of five states nationwide that tried, and failed, to pass a fetal heartbeat bill in 2014.

The state legislature was one of three states nationwide that tried, and failed, to pass a fetal heartbeat bill in 2015. They tried and failed again in 2016, 2017, and 2018. As of 2018, Florida, Nevada, and New York had laws prohibiting abortions after 24-weeks. As of May 14, 2019, the state prohibited abortions after the fetus was viable, generally some point between week 24 and 28. This period uses a standard defined by the US Supreme Court in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade ruling. In 2019, New York passed the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), which repealed a pre-Roe provision that banned third-trimester abortions except in cases where the continuation of the pregnancy endangered a pregnant woman’s life. The law said: “The legislature finds that comprehensive reproductive health care, including contraception and abortion, is a fundamental component of a woman’s health, privacy, and equality.“The bill also allowed qualified health practitioners to perform abortions, not just licensed medical doctors.

I guess you would call me pro-choice. I do not believe that this so-called “abortion issue” should even be an issue. This should NOT be a political issue at all. Is there a political issue governing what a man can do with his body? A woman should have the right to her own body and no old man in a stuffy black robe should have anything to say about it. Nor any old woman that has lost touch with reality.

Say what you will. You have to hand it to the pro life folks. There will never be a more relentlessly dedicated and persistent successful enforcement by any minority of what is without question an unpopular and indisputably minority position.