Slavery was not the only evil in the world, and its persistence was not the only possible evil, or even the worst possible evil — it might have persisted and spread, and it might have done so in spite of a bloody war over the question. And so Lincoln concluded that the persistence of slavery was tolerable, given the likely alternatives. Douglass, the former slave, did not see things exactly the same way, and the millions then in slavery very likely would have run the moral numbers in a way that produced an answer different from Lincoln’s.
And so it will be with abortion in the post-Roe era.
Overturning Roe was not the end of the abortion fight but its proper beginning. That fight is going to play out for years in state legislatures and in state courts, and possibly in the federal legislature and federal courts. There will be setbacks, as we have just experienced in Kansas. It will be long and frustrating, and there will be two temptations that must be resisted: The first is doing violence to our constitutional order when we see a shortcut toward our moral goals, and the second, more baleful, is the temptation to hate our fellow Americans when they disagree with us about this important question.
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