For years I never worried much about an outright reversal of Roe v. Wade, because I thought that the political instincts of conservative Justices would cause them to blink before they took that ultimate step, even if they had the five votes to do it.  If the right to choose were ever actually taken away from American women, the mostly dormant, somewhat ambivalent pro-choice majority would rise like a phoenix and exact revenge.  Goodbye to suburban mom Republican votes. And, although bad decisions have chipped away at it, Roe is still good law, at least formally.

More recently, I'm less certain about this underlying political calculation. If each state could decide whether to allow or prohibit abortion, many would opt for pro-choice laws much as they have today, and many women living in states where abortion was illegal would be able to travel to a location where they could obtain the procedure. 

Of course, it is also true that many would not be able to afford the time, the travel and the procedure. But those are only the poor women. My fear, to be blunt, is that if middle-class women basically retained the option to have an abortion, either formally through their state's law or informally through their own economic capacity, there would be no political price to pay for retracting the federal constitutional right entirely. And sooner or later, conservatives would figure that out.

Now Priscilla Smith, a savvy analyst of reproductive rights issues, has posted an intriguing essay at Balkinization in which she argues that the Stupak-Pitts amendment to the health reform bill might reverse this trend toward fragmentation along economic lines by putting the majority of women in the same sinking boat. Following are excerpts: