"As the history of prohibition instructs, the surest way to defeat the right-to-life movement would be to make abortion illegal."

"Not solely because it would give the movement what it wants," says Michael Kazin, "but also because a firm majority of Americans still support the right to choose in all or most circumstances—just as a majority back in the 1920s probably thought it was all right to buy a drink (the polling business did not yet exist)."

A reversal of Roe (much less a “pro-life” amendment) would quickly make heroes and heroines out of health workers who violated the law—much as [the Ken Burns film "Prohibition"], and most histories of the period, glamorize tipsy flappers and gangsters wielding submachine guns. The long history of prohibition unmistakably demonstrates that a divided public will quickly turn hostile when protestors with decent motives elect officials who carry out indecent assaults on individual freedom. In America, a movement of moralists is never so vulnerable as when it succeeds.