Liberals should let Roe die.

So writes self-professed liberal Benjamin Witte in the new Atlantic. His reasoning:

[T]he liberal commitment to Roe has been deeply unhealthy — for American democracy, for liberalism, and even for the cause of abortion rights itself....



By removing the issue from the policy arena, the Supreme Court has prevented abortion-rights supporters from winning a debate in which public opinion favors them....



[A] pro-lifer who complains that she never got her democratic say before abortion was legalized nationwide has a powerful grievance. And there's nothing quite like denying people a say in policy to energize their commitment to a position....



Roe puts liberals in the position of defending a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply while freeing those conservatives from any obligation to articulate a responsible policy that might command majority support....

These are points that have been made before, but Witte puts them together pithily. Note that he isn't really expressing a deep belief in democracy. He's only saying liberals shouldn't put so much energy into keeping Roe alive because if the matter is left to political decisionmaking, abortion rights will still win, and the upside of that will be that abortion opponents will have worked their grievance through their systems, and the abortion rights proponents will have been activated and enlivened by defending access to abortions rather than a flawed old Court opinion.



Yet little time is really spent now defending the reasoning of the Court opinion, which has lived for many years on the power of stare decisis. And you really can't assume you know what the end result of the political process will be. You can't even assume that the results of those surveys showing a majority of Americans want to preserve access to abortions will remain steady. If the political debate about abortions is opened up, people may very well change their minds on the subject. Witte thinks "Liberals should be salivating at their electoral prospects in a post-Roe world," but you really don't know how things would play out.