This will not be an America where pro-choicers and pro-lifers live peacefully side by side. Already, there is a National Network of Abortion Funds, which seeks to help women lacking easy access to abortion with money and transportation. Such operations would likely scale up dramatically post-Roe, helping women in the “Life States” reach “Reproductive Freedom” in the East or West, almost like a 21st century Underground Railroad.
Such efforts could easily outrage those in the “Life States,” who would contend that “carpetbaggers” were circumventing their laws and facilitating infanticide. They could well agitate for federal legislation making it crime to help a woman cross state lines to get an abortion, much like the Fugitive Slave Act sought to crush the Underground Railroad.
I’m not predicting such legislation would pass Congress, let alone suggesting we’re headed for Civil War II. But I do believe that in a post-Roe America, Abraham Lincoln’s words would ring in our ears: “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
