On Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court of the United States, by a 7-2 majority, discovered a sweeping constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy and struck down abortion laws across the country. Within five years, the number of abortions in America annually climbed above a million, where it would remain for 20 years.

To be pro-life, to regard abortion as obviously a form of murder and all those millions of dead unborn as its nameless victims, is to believe that the Roe v. Wade decision was a moment of deep moral rupture in the history of the republic. When it comes to the possibility that the modern American order is corrupt and under judgment, nobody is more “woke” than the committed opponent of abortion.

Yet abortion opponents, in the 1970s and afterward, responded to Roe v. Wade for the most part like normal citizens of a normal democratic state, not as dissidents within a murderous dystopia. The pro-life movement accepted, even in the face of what it considered a monstrous evil, the good of civic peace, and treated the evil of abortion as something to be addressed through the usual work of democratic politics — however long that work might take, across however many presidential elections and Supreme Court battles and public arguments and acts of private persuasion, and through however many setbacks and defeats along the way.

To the pro-choice side, especially to lukewarm pro-choicers looking to feel better about their own muddled sense of things, this choice has sometimes been cast as evidence that pro-lifers don’t really believe our own rhetoric — that if we really believed abortion to be murder, really murder, we wouldn’t be incrementalists and small-r republicans on the issue; we would support violence, rebellion, nullification, secession, you name it.