Daniel Larison has convinced me that the Freedom of Choice Act is a bad idea for now. In any event, this seems just a bit beside the point. The Court is pro-Roe, to be sure, and this is the sort of thing that would infuriate and energize the right while not necessarily providing any real benefits to the left. It's bad politics, especially when Roe is in little apparent danger, and while the pro-choice case would be strengthened by something as suitably democratic as a public law it seems like it ain't worth the cost.
I wonder how long the pro-life movement will persist in any recognizable form. People who think that movements last forever are sorely mistaken: they eventually end, either by accomplishing their objectives or not. I think it's safe to say that pro-lifers haven't really accomplished anything of substance--they've complicated the moral attitudes of many people toward abortion (as if it is a subject that doesn't naturally have that effect!) while enacting a few parental notification statutes in various states. The operative strategy of these groups is to legally ban abortion as they consider abortion to be murder--it follows logically to go for this approach, but just because tens of millions of people would like to be able to fly doesn't make it any more possible. And the pro-life movement is drawing more inward by pursuing the sorts of sweeping abortion bans that even significant swathes of pro-lifers in places like South Dakota reject. The course that they're on seems not to lead to anywhere promising.
More than anything else, it reminds me of Johnny Rotten's quest to destroy rock 'n roll by turning the Sex Pistols into a non-mainstream group that would push rock out of the mainstream by setting too strong an example to ignore, thus destroying rock. If I were in charge of the movement, I'd say it's time to focus on winning support for national parental consent and partial birth bans, which are popular and don't have particularly strong defenses (these mostly involve not wanting to "chip away" at Roe, as if there weren't already significant restrictions on abortion rights in America). That might be the strategy that pro-lifers wanted to use, but it seems like one more likely to win over new supporters, rather than losing them by making the movement more about ham-fisted bans that simply won't work even if enacted.
