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Post-Roe: Looking Backward at Us Again
Every public intellectual conducts the same thought experiment during the course of their career. They’ll speculate how the generation after the next will judge the contentious political debates of the present day.
William Raspberry, the celebrated Washington Post Columnist, partook in this thought experiment a couple of years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in a 1981 column titled — Looking Backward at Us.
Raspberry wrote, “Take the question of abortion. Maybe my grandchildren will find it laughable that so many of us even dreamed of questioning the right of a woman to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term — just as it strikes us as silly that our grandparents took seriously the question of whether it should be legal to buy a bottle of liquor. Or maybe they will be aghast that people in Grandpop’s day spent time debating whether a fetus was something other than a human being — just as we are aghast that an earlier generation spent time debating the humanity of black slaves. One way or another, the answer will be clear. Or, perhaps more likely, the question itself will have evaporated.”
But how would the moral gravity of the issue vanish? Raspberry believed that 100 years down the line, morality-by-consensus would resolve the matter.