Safe. Legal. Rare.

For those whose interest in the American Left only goes back as far as the Obama administration, it’s hard to explain what a triumph this was. Not only did the phrase create a big tent under which even people who felt morally ambivalent about abortion could comfortably gather, it also forced Republicans into insane, reactionary counter-positions. As well as safe and legal abortions, the Democrats were promoting comprehensive sex education and contraceptive access, which would help prevent unwanted pregnancies from happening in the first place — and Republicans, rather than make common cause with their enemies, mostly opted to argue against these things.

And so, for a brief but magical moment, the Democrats could reasonably claim to be the party of fewer abortions and more shagging, while conservatives were left to take the deeply unpopular position that all non-procreative sex was bad, actually.

Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic has observed the remarkable staying power of “safe, legal, and rare”, which “translated into language the inchoate sentiments of millions of Americans so exactly that they had to hear it only once for it to become their firmly held position on abortion”. The message was so effective that Hillary Clinton even resurrected it in 2008 during her first (ultimately unsuccessful) play for the Democratic presidential nomination. Two years after that President Barack Obama explicitly identified the phrase as “the right formulation” when it came to discussing abortion.

And yet, in the past 10 years, “safe, legal and rare” has fallen out of favour, as arguments emerged in the more language-obsessed corners of the Left that the “rare” part was unduly stigmatising. “It posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make”, one activist wrote last year, in an essay demanding the phrase be retired.

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It’s hard to overstate the utter self-sabotaging lunacy of this argument, which not only undermined one of the most popular lines of party messaging in decades but is also farcically nonsensical: “safe, legal, and rare” are surely a solid and desirable set of criteria for any medical procedure that is both unpleasant and unplanned, as abortions (but not only abortions) invariably are.  And yet, the argument prevailed: by the time Hillary ran for president in 2016, the word “rare” had been excised from the Democratic party platform.

In its place arose a variety of messages, none nearly as effective, and some deeply strange, even ghoulish. Among the most notable side effects of the argument that abortion need not be rare is an increasingly prevalent notion that perhaps pregnancy should be. In the days following the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision that ultimately overturned Roe v Wade, the very online Left traded horror stories about what it can do to your body. One much-shared Twitter thread from an obstetrician enumerated the risks of pregnancy like a carnival barker marketing a house of horrors: “Hemorrhage from miscarriage or ectopic, sepsis, blood clots, strokes, heart attacks, hyperemesis and intractable vomiting, increased domestic violence, exacerbations of heart disease, lupus and rheumatologic disease, hypertension, seizures, and mental illness, diabetes” — it’s all right here, folks, and that’s before we even get to the torn anal sphincter and urinary incontinence! Step right up, ladies!

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The pro-choice press has only reinforced the horror, by giving us wall-to-wall coverage of the danger of pregnancy and childbirth. Here’s New York Times columnist Pamela Paul with a gut-twisting account of her emergency C-section, which culminated in “being held down by two doctors while my body parts were gathered and reinserted into my torso”. Here’s Kate Manning in the Washington Post talking about urine leakage, blood-covered bedsheets, “cracked nipples and infected breasts”. Here’s Scientific American warning us that “even a seemingly ‘safe’ pregnancy is not without significant risk”. Of course, the intention is only to emphasise that nobody should be forced to go through this — but you would be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that not only should abortion be available on demand, but that no woman in her right mind would ever carry a pregnancy to term unless she had some sort of death wish.

Gone are the days when the Left took pains to emphasise that it was not pro-abortion, but against unwanted pregnancy; instead, this moderate stance has metastasised into a demonisation of pregnancy in general. Some have framed this as a look-what-you-made-me-do position forced by the anti-choice Right: “If there was ever anything beautiful about pregnancy, the anti-abortion movement has devoured it, and spat up something hateful in its place. Pregnancy, for many, will now end dreams, alter futures, maybe even kill,” writes New York Magazine‘s Sarah Jones.

In a recent essay for The Bulwark, Mona Charen laments that “young women reading these stories may get the impression that pregnancy is a hellscape of pain, disfigurement, and degradation”. (I disagree with this argument not in substance but in scope: these stories are no less terrifying to women in middle age who, in their waning fertility, might have been on the fence about having kids and are now loathe to do so lest they turn into the Elephant Man.) But even if this type of rhetoric doesn’t ultimately put a dent in the birth rate, it seems to reflect a penchant on the Left for the opposite of coalition-building, for busting up the movement one taboo turn of phrase at a time. Goodbye, “rare”. Goodbye, “women”. Goodbye, “choice” — the beating heart of the movement, now categorised as “harmful language” — and goodbye to the allies who favoured these terms, now severed and drifting away from the movement like Inuit elders who have outlived their usefulness, cast onto an ice floe to die.

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Most remarkable is that abortion access is, in fact, an issue with direct bearing on the lives of a vast majority of Americans — not only women, but any man in a heterosexual partnership with one — and yet some of the loudest voices on this issue insist on describing it as anything but. Consider the now-notorious tweet in which the ACLU listed all the groups most impacted by abortion bans. “The LGBTQ community” was second; “women” were not listed at all.

Such rhetoric is inevitably adopted in the name of inclusivity, which is funny, given how it not only sparks internecine infighting but also rules out virtually every position that might have had widespread resonance in the way that “safe, legal, and rare” once did. It was especially surreal to see this happen in the month or so following the leaked Dobbs decision, which left little doubt that Roe would fall. Neither the revelation of imminent doom nor the arrival of said doom last week could deter the Left from its determination to eat itself alive. Abortion is now banned, or on the verge of being banned, in nearly half of America’s states — and yet we’re still sniping about white women like it’s 2016.

The inability to organise reflects an adolescent impulse within contemporary feminism, an urge to define oneself primarily through the rejection of the waves that came before us. The “safe, legal, and rare” message that framed abortion as necessary but not necessarily desirable is just another relic of the bad old days of Bill, an era in which liberals not only elevated a tomcatting playboy to the presidency, but rallied behind him amid rape allegations, impeachment, and his prosecution for an affair with a then-23-year-old White House intern. That parts of Clinton’s messaging might still be popular with contemporary voters is irrelevant; everything he touched, everything that coexisted in the same moment as his presidency, is tainted by the nauseous aura of boomer cringe.

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The problem is that we don’t have anything nearly as good to replace it, at a moment when a mass call to arms could not be more desperately needed. The absurd suggestion that abortion access is best understood as an LGBT issue, rather than a woman’s one, isn’t going to help us match the momentum of the Right in a post-Roe world; neither is the imperative to “Shout your abortion” while painting pregnancy as an undesirable, disfiguring disease. These tactics cause rifts even within a base of committed pro-choice activists; a truly inclusive abortion rights movement would surely look more like the painstakingly moderate — and highly successful — Repeal the 8th campaign in Ireland, which respected more conservative elders (there was a “Grandfathers for Yes” faction) rather than rejecting them.

Without a course correction, the Left will soon back itself into a corner, not unlike the Nineties Republican reactionaries who adopted radically unpopular ideas rather than make common cause with their opponents, only worse. Not only are we at war with the Right, we’re also at war with ourselves, with the memory of what the pro-choice movement used to be. It’s a battle that is poorly conceived and ultimately unwinnable in its refusal to acknowledge the truth: that abortion access is vital and necessary, but abortion itself is not a good thing.

No woman sets out to have an abortion; nobody wants one on its own merits. Like most medical procedures, abortion is a solution to a problem — either an unwanted pregnancy, or a desired pregnancy gone awry. In an ideal world, abortion would not only be rare, but entirely unnecessary. It is because we don’t live in an ideal world, and never will, that the right to choose must be preserved.

Everyone knew Roe was shaky. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong pro-choice advocate, expressed regrets that the abortion question hadn’t been decided by a stronger case, one that centred on a woman’s right to bodily autonomy rather than the nebulous notion of “privacy”. Instead of surviving on the merits, the validity of Roe became largely a question of precedent: the best argument for the continued upholding of the decision was the fact that it had, so far, been upheld.

This was exciting to some, terrifying to others, and destabilising for the entire nation. For pro-lifers, the case was an annoying obstacle that forced them to chip away at abortion protections through piecemeal measures — such as outlawing certain types of late-term abortion or burdening clinics with so many onerous regulations that they were forced to close their doors — while praying that the Supreme Court might eventually skew conservative enough to let an outright ban make it through. For pro-choicers, Roe was nothing less than a bulwark against a return to the bad old days when desperate women died of septic shock and punctured wombs after trying to terminate their own pregnancies with coat hangers.

On all sides, extreme rhetoric ruled the day, fuelled by a sense that abortion protections were perpetually hanging by a single thread. Yet nobody ever seemed to really believe the thread would break — until this week, when a leak from inside the Supreme Court revealed that the justices intend to rule in favour of overturning Roe.

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This glimpse of the future of abortion rights is grave, even if women’s ability to access the procedure currently remains unchanged. Unless one of the five justices in favour of the ruling changes his or her mind, the toppling of Roe is inevitable.

And yet, in the long run, perhaps this is a good thing.

This is not to downplay the short-term negative impacts of the decision, which will cause deep and immediate disruptions to women’s lives, to the healthcare system, and to local government that must now legislate abortion access on the state level. In some states, including New Jersey and Delaware, laws already exist to protect abortion rights in the event that Roe is overturned; in others, such as Texas and Mississippi, the Supreme Court’s decision will trigger laws that either severely restrict or fully eliminate legal access to the procedure.

Overnight, the distribution of reproductive rights will become wildly uneven: women who live in more liberal states will still be able to obtain an abortion easily. Women who don’t — or who can’t easily travel to a state with fewer restrictions — will almost certainly face terrible hardship in the event of an unwanted pregnancy.

American politicians, who could avoid taking a stance on abortion as long as Roe remained in place, are now staring down a campaign season in which it will be among the most pivotal issues in play.

But given the choice between a national reckoning on abortion and another 50 years of waiting nervously to see if Roe will crumble under its own weight, does anyone really prefer the latter? Women’s bodily autonomy should never have depended for so long on a single Supreme Court decision, especially one with such well-documented weaknesses.

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The leaked draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito, notes that “Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division” — and he’s not wrong. The Supreme Court is a lousy tool for making lasting policy, and the perception that abortion rights were always just one winning court case away from a 180-degree reversal has allowed this issue to be dominated by the most extreme voices on both sides.

On the Left, radical pro-choice activists have demanded unrestricted abortion basically until the moment of live birth, engaged in coarse cheerleading such as the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag, and cheered for a Yale student who announced that she had aborted half a dozen pregnancies as a form of performance art. Meanwhile, on the Right, deranged anti-choicers had shrieking meltdowns over the “sluts” who wanted access to birth control, suggested that exceptions for rape and incest were biologically unnecessary because the body would “shut that whole thing down”, and waved giant placards with images of mutilated babies outside women’s health clinics.

Amid all this, it was easy to forget that the general American public has far more complex views on this issue, and far more in common with each other than with the loudest activists on either side. The majority of Americans are, in fact, quite pro-choice — when it comes to abortions within the first trimester, which 61% of people believe should be legal in all or most cases. But the majority also greatly favour restrictions to later-term abortion: 65% believe that second-trimester abortion should be largely illegal.

So the fact that, in all this time, Democrats have failed to advance pro-choice federal legislation that might have codified abortion rights into law seems short-sighted. They have chosen instead to let Roe be the only thing standing between us and the impending chaos of abortion access being decided state-by-state. And the fact that they’ve done so even as the Right pushed through the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funds such as Medicaid from being used to pay for abortions) and the federal ban on certain late-term abortion procedures is nothing short of foolish.

This reckoning should have happened years ago, if not decades.

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The next best thing, though, is for it to happen now. And with the fate of Roe no longer hanging in the balance, with the binary question answered, maybe we can have a more nuanced conversation than we’ve had for the past 50 years. Imagine if, rather than endless back and forth shrieks of “Woman hater!” on one side and “Baby killer!” on the other, we started on the common ground shared by a substantial majority of citizens — and actually began the difficult but important work of codifying abortion access into law.

Democratic politicians, particularly, have long been elected amid promises to be staunch advocates for a woman’s right to choose; Joe Biden even vowed during his presidential campaign to introduce legislation that would explicitly enshrine the protections provided by Roe as actual law, not just case law (although he’s now pivoted to using the fall of Roe as a clarion call to elect more Democrats in November).

But with all eyes on the Supreme Court, these promises were largely symbolic; now, for the first time in decades, Americans will be looking to their elected representatives to take meaningful action on this issue. If ever there was a moment for Congress to stop its dysfunctional peacocking and actually do its jobs — including the sort of across-the-aisle collaboration that has historically been a vital component of passing legislation on contentious issues — it’s this one.

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None of this promises to be easy, especially against the fraught backdrop of our polarised political landscape. A successful resolution requires pro-choicers to confront the unpopularity of later-term abortion and be willing to compromise by allowing restrictions on it — perhaps in exchange for easier access to early-term medical abortions, and definitely in exchange for free, over-the-counter access to hormonal birth control.

Pro-lifers, similarly, would need to abandon their quaint obsession with sexual moralising, and support family planning and other policies that make it as easy as possible for women to avoid unwanted pregnancies. Everyone would need to reacquaint themselves with the concept of compromise for the sake of the common good.

Whether our elected representatives would do what they should do to build a legislative consensus on this topic remains to be seen. And between the majority support for legal first-trimester abortion and the availability of mifepristone (including by mail) for terminating pregnancies up to 10 weeks old, we can at least be thankful that a return to the bad old days where women died in agony after botched back-alley abortions is probably no longer in the cards.

But there is still a price to allowing this issue to revert to the states. It will deepen the divide between red and blue America, to the extent that something as fundamental as a woman’s right to save her own life by aborting an ectopic pregnancy will depend on where in the nation she lives. Even in a country as big and diverse as this one, some issues require national unity lest they tear us apart.

And perhaps it’s too late for all of this; perhaps the leak of this draft decision, an unprecedented violation of our democratic norms and a very bad sign for the integrity of the Supreme Court, is the writing on the wall. Maybe our legislators have simply lost the ability to cooperate across the aisle, to build a consensus on anything, ever, let alone an issue as explosive as this one. Maybe this is the real deal, the pre-apocalyptic dysfunction that heralds a long and catastrophic decline.

But it is also an opportunity: to pull ourselves back from the brink, to find momentum amid the chaos, to build a coalition that may differ wildly on the issue of abortion rights but shares a desire to see the country survive and move forward. Because as much as we may mourn it, the era of Roe is over. What matters is what comes next.

Along with debates about manufacturing, distribution and regulatory capture, the situation has reignited the never-ending debate about whether or not breastfeeding has a moral dimension. Is formula feeding selfish and lazy and liable to reduce a baby’s IQ and give them lifelong obesity? Is breastfeeding a noble sacrifice?

Much of the autonomy — especially bodily autonomy — women take for granted in the modern developed world is not delivered by feminism, so much as it’s rationalised by it. The freedom itself is an effect of technologies that mitigate, substitute for or otherwise even out physical differences between the sexes.

We’re barely into a 21^st century that so far is marked by pandemic, inflation, fragmenting supply chains, rising energy costs, global instability and concern over the ecological costs of developed-world lifestyles. In that context, the thorny question of tech and women’s freedom cuts across Left and Right in ways that are only just becoming apparent.

When I talk about “technology”, I don’t mean an iPhone that unlocks when I present my face to its camera. I mean those things so much part of everyday developed-world life they’re part of the backdrop. We don’t routinely think of nappies, washing machines, birth control or formula milk as “technology”. But they are all based in science and engineering, produced in high-tech factories, distributed via complex global supply chains.

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You’d think this would be value-neutral. It’s not, though, for such technologies have social impacts too. For example, the Sixties wasn’t the first age to see men and women challenging restrictive social codes: the 19^th century also had a “Free Love” movement. But earlier such movements could do nothing about the asymmetrical risks involved in casual sex, which could be relatively consequence-free for men while threatening women women with unplanned pregnancy and then (assuming she survived childbirth) the question of what to do with the baby.

Not unreasonably, regardless of what free-thinkers and radicals said in pamphlets and meetings, most ordinary communities went on strongly encouraging women to insist on commitment before having sex. It wasn’t until a tech fix for this asymmetry — reliable birth control — became available society-wide that wider social norms started to shift. At that point, commitment-free sexual pleasure became a feminist issue: Germaine Greer declared in The Female Eunuch (1970) that women are “not naturally monogamous”, while Erica Jong’s 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying dreamed of an equal female right to the “zipless fuck”.

A vast amount of the subsequent social fabric, from marriage and parenting norms to dating culture, are downstream of the tech that enabled the sexual revolution. And if you took the tech abruptly away, it’s likely that many people accustomed to post-Pill norms would struggle until the culture adapted.

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In a similar way, the norms of developed-world mothering are difficult to uncouple from widespread availability of formula. It saves the lives of babies who might have starved in a pre-formula era; it’s a plan B for mothers who, for whatever reason, find breastfeeding hard (and it is hard); it grants a measure of freedom and flexibility that’s unavailable to a mother breastfeeding exclusively.

As such, it also impacts the wider social fabric. This has many upsides, but hasn’t come cost-free. The existence of formula milk means even new mothers are able to work outside the home, a fact that shapes not just social expectations but also the economy. It’s perhaps no surprise that in the US, where there’s no statutory maternity leave, one in four mothers returns to work a mere two weeks after giving birth; and those American mothers at the bottom of the economic ladder, and thus least likely to have an employer with generous maternity leave policies, are the most likely to use formula.

According to some conservative American feminists, though, this is by no means the most consequential tech fix, either in terms of its contribution to bodily autonomy or in its downstream social impact. The legal scholar and pro-life campaigner Erika Bachiochi argues that this dubious honour goes to legal abortion: a technology and social change whose contribution to female autonomy has been immense – as has its downstream impact.

In her 2021 book The Rights of Women: Reclaiming A Lost Vision Bachiochi argues that even as legalising abortion increased women’s autonomy, it also reduced the pressure on men to take reproductive responsibility: for example one famous study shows that shotgun weddings all but disappeared after legalisation. Additionally, placing sole reproductive responsibility on the pregnant woman eliminates any need for society more generally to provide any kind of compassionate safety-net.

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Small wonder, then, that three out of four American women who have an abortion give poverty as the reason: a tech fix for sometimes gruelling social and economic difficulties. Anyone who spends more than a few minutes on “Shout Your Abortion“, a website dedicated to normalising the practice by telling women’s abortion stories, will see how ambivalent many women were in practice about the choices that were open to them, and the one they took.

This dilemma feels all the more concrete since the recent US Supreme Court leak, that suggests judges are poised to overturn America’s nationwide right to legal abortion. Much has been written since by pro-choice feminists defending abortion access as a cornerstone of women’s freedom. And in the same sense as formula and birth control, it’s a technology that does indeed grant women greater freedom. But more broadly even than changes to marriage and sexual mores, Bachiochi argues that its wider social impact makes abortion a Faustian bargain for women, by placing placed mothers permanently on the back foot.

For in making the right to terminate a pregnancy a cornerstone of freedom and thus personhood, she argues, feminism embraced a male-standard idea of what people are as the default: unencumbered, atomised, free of caring obligations. Normalising this individualistic idea of what a person is has left everyone with caring obligations (ie especially mothers) structurally disadvantaged, even as it legitimises undervaluing and underpaying those who do caring work.

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And even as caring work is structurally undervalued in an economy predicated on tech-enabled freedom, women are then castigated for choosing the ‘less caring’ tech fix – or blamed and scorned for their vulnerability when the tech is no longer available. The singer Bette Midler epitomised this attitude when she tweeted in response to the formula shortage: “TRY BREASTFEEDING! It’s free and available on demand.”

An even more callous Midlerism drips from every right-winger who has ever banged the drum for ending abortion access, while showing zero interest in the wider social context in which women opt to abort. This might mean improving perinatal healthcare access or social safety nets, incentivising paternal responsibility, or even advocating for a less hypersexualised society. But with the honourable exception of Catholic feminists such as Bachiochi, and a handful of post-liberals, American conservatism seems keener on leaning wholesale into the tech-enabled freedom and individualism consistent with a world where abortion is legal – just with an exception where women’s bodies are concerned. Examples are legion, but one that caused particular outrage amid the Dobbs furore was a video clip showing (male) members of New York’s Fire Department crowing: “you have no choice […] not your body not your choice, your body is mine”.

Given such an unforgiving backdrop, it’s understandable that many feminists prioritise defending abortion (or formula) over fighting an uphill battle to transform every other social factor that makes dependent babies and caring obligations such a frightening prospect for so many women. All other things being equal, I can see how a tech fix might seem women’s only option in a truly pitiless predicament.

But if the Right is hopelessly confused on technology and freedom, oscillating between wanting to ban gender surgeries and abortion and calling for us to colonise Mars, the Left is equally muddled. This progressive cognitive dissonance over technology and women celebrates tech’s liberatory upside, while hand-wringing guiltily about its innumerable ecological costs. Disposable nappies, for example, make up 30% of all landfill waste and take 500 years to decompose. Formula milk has a carbon cost. And the contraceptive pill many otherwise eco-conscious feminists rely on for sexual liberation is a disastrous pollutant.

Tech-optimists argue that we can fix all this with more tech. More likely, say the doomers, that in the future more of us will have to manage without – a prospect the current formula shortage is doing nothing to dispel. If the doomers are right, who will pick up all the labour-intensive domestic work currently eased by technology? Of course it’s possible that climate change will do what half a century of feminist activism never achieved, and level the still wildly uneven burden of housework between the sexes, but I’m not holding my breath.

In any case, regardless of what happens with formula supplies or US abortion law, it seems more than likely that these are not the only technologies that seemed to promise a level playing field between the sexes in the twentieth century, only to grow scarcer in the twenty-first. For even if Left and Right are differently muddled as to which liberatory technologies they defend and which they decry, the overall portfolio of such technologies is indisputably less certain than it seemed even a decade ago.

If I’m right, a women’s movement fit for the 21st century will need to work out what it means to defend women’s interests (and especially those of mothers) in a world with far fewer labour-saving devices, and potentially far less reproductive autonomy. Not a feminism of ever-increasing material abundance and freedom, but a new feminism of scarcity.