I think I'll say it again.

David Brooks is SUCH an ass.

The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.

You know, the anti-abortion folks could just give up their core convictions too.

Unable to lobby for their pro-life or pro-choice views in normal ways, abortion activists focused their attention on judicial nominations.

Here's the deal. If your goal is to prevent abortions and the law allows them, what you want to do is eliminate the need for them. Because it is literally impossible to make them unavailable.