The Devil is in the Details, so Let’s Avoid the Details: The pro-abortion party tries to defend the practice by not talking about it.

As noted in the leaked draft, many of the favorite arguments of pro-abortion activists have grown stale. Single mothers are no longer stigmatized in America in any significant way; about a third of children under 18 live in single-parent households, 75 percent of which are headed by mothers. An astounding 72 percent of black American households are single-parent, so the implied suggestion in the old pro-Roe arguments that single-parenthood is less than optimum is a fraught third rail for abortion advocates, who don’t want to be seen as stigmatizing a way of life that characterizes most black children.

As for employment-related consequences for working mothers, women are protected from employer discrimination based on pregnancy, paid family leave is increasingly common. There are protections for women who wish to give up a child they don’t wish to raise themselves, and adoptions are closely monitored and potential adoptive parents extensively vetted.

Even the reliable slogan, “My Body, My Choice” has lost some of its logical grip, given the recent dedication to vaccine mandates by many of the same activists alarmed by the return of abortion regulation to the states. Indeed, the standby position of the feminist movement, that abortion laws are designed to control women’s bodies, becomes “problematic” for a Democrat party that asserts men can become pregnant, too. California Governor Gavin Newsom forgot this new doctrine when repeating a trope popular among older abortion enthusiasts, “If men could get pregnant, this wouldn’t even be a conversation.” And so the preferred euphemism employed by Democrats for decades when discussing abortion, “women’s health,” is invalidated two ways: abortion is obviously not healthy, and according to the Left’s own standards, it’s not exclusive to women.

But the most problematic aspect of dusting off their old pro-abortion talking points is the lack of a racial angle. The Democrat Party is struggling to portray the opponents of mass abortion in the black community as white supremacists. But complaining that blacks will lose access to a system facilitating the large-scale erasure of their pregnancies does not strike the right note. Worrying that lack of access to abortion in the later trimesters will result in more “unwanted” children (disproportionately black) begs the question of who doesn’t want them. Liberal economist Steven Levitt famously argued that legal abortion led directly to a reduction in the crime rate a generation later; blacks may not be quite as enthused at this clever approach to crime reduction as the Freakonomists.

Many abortion advocates have objected to a potential overturn of the “settled” issue of abortion. But even as blacks continue to experience abortions at a rate that elsewhere might be described by progressives as a disparate impact, the overall abortion rate in the U.S. is falling. The abortion rate increased from 1973, the year of the Roe decision, to 1980, but never reached that level again and is now lower than at any time since Roe. One might infer that the popularity of abortion with the American people is not completely settled.