The right-to-life movement has not existed for a century, as did the dry army, but four decades after Roe v. Wade, its influence is formidable. Nearly every Republican office-holder and many a Democrat opposes abortion, and few physicians in red states will serve a woman who wants one. In many ways, the prohibition movement was the precursor to the anti-abortion battle. Right-to-lifers also view themselves as crusaders for both Christ and the family, most are avid church-goers and get backing from the pulpit, and they have the numbers and resources to keep battling into the distant future. Like the Anti-Saloon League, they have also followed a careful, state-by-state strategy of cutting off opportunities for engaging in what they view as sinful behavior.
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, 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 this film, 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. The New Republic
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