After 49 years of legal arguments, protests and political battles over the composition of the Supreme Court, the court has finally overturned Roe v. Wade.

No matter how you feel about abortion, this should be welcomed as a healthy development for American democracy and for the rule of written law made by the people’s representatives. Roe was a legal mistake that played a large role in driving our national politics crazy. Now the democratic process gets to decide what happens to abortion. //

The Supreme Court’s job is to read the law, not write it. Nothing in the Constitution mentions abortion even indirectly, and nobody before the 1970s thought the Constitution made abortion legal. At the time, even pro-abortion legal scholars thought Roe was shoddy. Its trimester framework reads more like a piece of legislation than like judicial reasoning, yet it foreclosed the democratic process from the kinds of compromises and changes over time that usually go into popularly enacted laws. //

The undemocratic nature of Roe produced a backlash that left the pro-life movement in politics much stronger than it had been in 1973. It revolutionized how political conservatives thought about constitutional law. It mobilized opposing factions in national elections, polarized along religious and cultural lines. It turned Supreme Court nominations into a circus. It occasionally triggered violence.