Is there a silver lining in any of this? Clearly not for the women who will immediately suffer from it, but are there any potential political advantages here? Yes, I know that sounds detached and a bit inhumane.
To what extent would "states rights" be of interest to typically Democratic states? I always see this idea attached to Republicans.
The main advantage I see is the drain of young people from Southern states, which are already the poorest, leaving them with an increasingly aging population while helping to contradict that tendency in typically Democratic states. The main victims will be the poorest within those states, as always, since they have more difficulty to move across state borders. Southern states are likely to become even more "red", older, and crucially, with a less qualified population, which will further degrade their capacity to compete in a capitalist economy as companies seek to invest elsewhere.
On the other hand, as someone who isn't American, the idea of federal government having less power doesn't come across as all that bad (to me and others living outside the US). Is such a decision by the Supreme Court likely to cause a process of further decentralization? Or is this just a one off thing, disguised in the language of "states rights" because it is convenient? The US and China have too much power concentrated in their central government as it is, so a softening of that might be desirable. But this is probably a gullible notion, and a recently inaugurated Republican government in 2025 would gladly use federal power to enforce a nation wide ban.
Surely that's fine, right?
