Another generation will learn what desperate women will do

This may have been the most prescient sign at Tuesday's demonstration. No bunch of Christian nationalists are going to stop a lot of women from aborting. Women have always done what women had to do -- whether that be raise children in poverty or violent circumstances or avoid having children when they couldn't or shouldn't raise them. Women get abortions.

Some will be in sanctuary states, so long as the majority can hold off the authoritarians. But some will be by whatever means women can imagine that might end an unwanted pregnancy. Yes, the famous coat hanger -- or throwing themselves down a flight of stairs -- or douching with heaven knows what.

I'm old enough to remember what being a young woman was like when abortion was illegal. We took up collections for pregnant classmates to send them off on buses to Tijuana, to risk their lives under the instruments of unknown practitioners. Some of our attitudes toward the Tijuana option were racist; but the dangers were real. You could be permanently injured by some greedy quack. Women will do what they think they have to do.

Modern abortion drugs will reduce some of the dangers, so long as the restrictionists fail to proscribe them. But women will abort, somehow.