Even if Republicans Outlaw Abortion, Americans Will Soon Rebel

A movement that seeks to compel Americans to live according to a stringent moral code may be most vulnerable when it succeeds.

For more than half a century, anti-abortion activists, most of whom were or are either conservative Catholics or evangelical Protestants, lobbied state legislatures and Congress, held prayer vigils and mass demonstrations, and recruited a dedicated regiment of lawyers and judges to advance their cause. “This is a great day for preborn children and their mothers,” declared the National Right to Life Committee in June after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, hailing “the work of millions” of citizens who carried its message “into every nook, cranny and corner of America for decades.”

Now that movement has a new and more difficult task: to press its allies in state governments and the courts to enact and enforce new abortion restrictions and to persuade the public to accept the criminalization of what a majority of Americans have long said should be legal.

A century ago, another mass movement, also driven by religious zeal, faced a similar challenge — and utterly failed to overcome it. In 1919, the amendment to prohibit the sale and manufacture of alcohol became part of the Constitution.

Millions of Americans in the “dry army” celebrated what they believed was the culmination of a crusade that burned to outlaw what was one of the largest and most ubiquitous consumer industries in the land. The evangelist Billy Sunday exulted: “The reign of tears is over. … Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

Since the middle of the 19th century, prohibitionists had pressed, in a variety of ways, to ban the “liquor traffic,” which they cursed for debauching men who neglected or abused their wives and children. Women knelt in prayer before taverns to shame their owners to shut down. Every year, thousands of Protestant churches observed Anti-Saloon Sunday, when donations were collected, and petitions were signed for the cause.

Dry factions bloomed in both major parties, although Republicans were more solidly united behind the idea than Democrats. By the time Congress passed the 18th amendment, prohibition was the law in nearly half the states; 17 had done the deed by popular vote.

Yet the vigor of enforcement seldom matched the movement’s crusading fervor. Kansas passed a dry law in 1880, but illegal saloons known as “blind pigs” operated rather freely in the cities of the state. When the temperance activist Carry A. Nation took to raiding such places, hatchet in hand, she was seeking to embarrass government officials for shirking their duties; they sent her to jail for destroying private property.

She and fellow evangelical Protestants were the soul of the movement, but most Americans of other faiths or none at all regarded prohibition as an assault on their personal liberty. Catholic immigrants who had settled one Iowa county defied the law, egged on by their local priest, who let them produce moonshine in the basement of his church. In 1913, Congress enacted a ban on shipping alcoholic beverages into dry states, but the authorities could do little to enforce it.

Once the dry movement got the Constitution on its side, resistance to its mission intensified. Canadian distilleries shipped thousands of cases of whisky across the border. Al Capone and other urban gangsters became fabulously wealthy forcing speakeasies to sell only the alcohol the mob provided. Applauded by many Catholic and Jewish voters, mayors in New York and San Francisco denounced the law — and refused to help effectively enforce it.

Underfinanced, understaffed and often unmotivated police forces could not prevent people from violating the law, whether those criminals were armed with submachine guns or just a bourbon and soda. A mere 129 federal agents were helpless to prevent New York City from becoming a metropolis of lawbreakers.

The prohibitionists thus lost their reputation as a movement of compassionate idealists and got saddled with a new one: allies of a state bureaucracy that lashed out, clumsily, at anyone who did not behave like a devout rural Protestant, a group that included Catholics and Jews, as well as wealthy city dwellers.

With the onset of the Great Depression, the resistance to Prohibition emerged as a political juggernaut. Black and white workers in the urban North reacted to the harsh coercion of the federal state by voting for wet Democrats. In 1932, they rallied to the presidential campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who vowed to help speed the end of national prohibition. A year later, Roosevelt happily announced the ratification of the amendment repealing what Herbert Hoover, the president he had defeated in a landslide, had called “the great experiment.”

Of course, the political challenge of stopping abortions will differ from the challenge of abolishing the traffic in alcohol. State, not federal, authorities are in charge now, and they may face less of a backlash from constituents, many of whom have long sympathized with the anti-abortion cause. And it would most likely be more perilous to operate a safe underground clinic than it was to run a speakeasy in places where most people considered saloons a permanent, if sometimes regrettable, feature of urban culture.

Yet, in some ways, the anti-abortion movement after the Supreme Court’s Dobbsdecision is actually weaker than was its moralist precursor when prohibition became the law of the land. Nearly 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the Dobbs decision. And while many conservative Christians of all denominations think abortion is sinful, they no longer command public opinion as did evangelicals a little over a century ago. In addition, the two major parties are now firmly planted on opposite sides of the issue, whereas prohibition had bipartisan support. And young women, vital foot soldiers in the bygone dry army, now overwhelmingly oppose the judicial and legislative effort to police their wombs.

Republicans like Mike Pence may vow to outlaw abortion everywhere, but to enforce a national ban would require a very different citizenry than the one that inhabits 21st-century America.

Abortion rights advocates are already pursuing ways to undermine the new powers the Supreme Court has given to individual states. Lawyers cite provisions in state constitutions guaranteeing the right to privacy, activists raise funds to send abortion medications through the mail, and with President Biden’s latest executive order, the White House has taken steps to bolster abortion rights, even in red states. Stories of teenagers forced to bear children that resulted from rape and of health workers jailed for helping desperate poor women end their pregnancies could soon make the anti-abortion movement seem more sadistic than virtuous.

Of course, one cannot predict the nature of all the legal and extralegal battles that lie ahead. Even after prohibition was repealed, governments at all levels did continue to regulate the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic beverages — but they lost the power (and the public support) to ban it outright.

Today, if the history of prohibition is any guide, the public will quickly turn hostile when activists with decent motives elect officials (or appoint judges) who carry out indecent and unenforceable assaults on individual freedom. In the end, most Americans will rebel against authorities who decree what they can do with their own bodies.

Michael Kazin (@mkazin) is the author, most recently, of “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.” He is a professor of history at Georgetown University.

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