Welp.

There is nothing good in the repeal of Roe.  That's for sure.  I shudder when I think of the pointless death and suffering and life-derailment that will come in tidal waves, and not exclusively to women either.  Oh it will.  The "justices" who voted for it should spend the rest of eternity floundering around in an ocean of boiling feces.  As should all their enablers.  Let's not be coy about this.

But I do think a bit about, like, the reaction to this situation, and what, beyond the immediate horrible implications, it's going to mean, if anything.  Even if Republicans enact a national abortion ban, women will still need abortions.  Many won't get them, tragically, but a not-inconsiderable number still will, whether via travel or illicitly-obtained drugs or other underground networks.  Remember how effective prohibition was at eradicating alcohol?  Expect even more violent pushback in the current case.  How to deal with this?  The only way would be to create the most draconian, authoritarian state you can imagine.  I wonder if Republicans are ready for that?  My answer would be that they probably think they are, but they'll end up taken aback by what they have to do.  Even if they entirely get their way, I'm not sure it would be realistically possible to put the necessary infrastructure in place.

But will the anti-choicers think?  Well, I have to say, I think a lot of them are in for a rude awakening as well.  Is even the most benign form of anti-abortion sentiment down to some degree of ingrained misogyny?  Well...probably, but there's misogyny and there's misogyny.  These people grow up only thinking about abortion in the most abstract, theoretical way possible (uncomfortable questions tend to come up when you get into specifics), with fetuses pictured as cartoon cherubs.  In spite of their insistence that abortion is genocide, their rhetoric is often quite tenuous in its connection to the real world.  So, when faced with the grim reality of their dreams come to pass, unable to avoid seeing the very real consequences, how do you react?  I mean, I'm happy to stipulate that all of our elected Republicans who don't end up needing an abortion for themselves or their relatives are gonna be totes cool with it (and even the ones with personal experience will almost certainly just turn into "for me but not for thee" types), because they're psychopaths.  They didn't have to be, but they allowed themselves to become creatures that had no choice.  Regular people, though?  I'm not quite so prepared to give up on them, or at least more than maybe, I dunno, half of them.  I really, truly think that some non-trivial percentage of them, the ones who can't bring themselves to rationalize further, will experience true horror.

Will all this be enough to change anything?  I'd say...IF the US doesn't just collapse into unvarnished fascism, and IF climate change doesn't destroy civilization, I'd say...in the long enough run, yeah, almost certainly.  But those are two goddamn giant IFS, and even if we get lucky we'll probably all be dead before we see some semblance of justice restored.  So please don't misread me as being optimistic here.