@alexandra-again sorry I tried to respond in the replies but my reply got long, so here it is in full:
Will it take 50 years? Yes and no.
As Steve said in the comic, there will be a lot of downstream effects that will happen much sooner, in, say, 5-10 years. For example, if you are moving your local city government and school board to the left, they are the ones who are deciding on housing, education, police departments, public transportation, and the minimum wage. If you are moving your state government to the left, they are the ones who decide on abortion, voting access, prison reform, etc. All of those things *aren’t* explicitly restoring Roe v Wade, but they will make life better in infinite small ways.
What that will also do, is make it easier to do national-level things. Greater voting access will make it easier to vote in elections for Congress and the Presidency. Greater quality of life makes it easier for people to find the time and energy to vote and to participate in community. One of the problems right now is that the Senate is voted by state (I put this awkwardly in the comic, leading to some confusion -- the state legislature doesn’t vote for US senators, but the people of each state does). If you are liberal-leaning but living in a state that is toxic to you, you have a very big impetus to leave the state, which then leaves increasingly conservative states that continues to have two senators in the Senate. If, on the other hand, local and state level activism leads the downstream effects to make life in that state would be less toxic, then more people would be okay with staying and pushing the agenda even further left.
Also, this sort of state level activism will put progressive people in positions of power when national level things come into play. When the 19th Amendment passed through the Congress, it needed to be ratified by 36 states, and the suffagettes were able to get 35 states to ratify it within half a year, even given the usual pace of legislative crawl. How? It’s because they were already active and ready on the state level in most of the Western states. A lot of the states already had universal, or at least presidential suffrage. Or, if you look at now, a lot of states are poised to ban abortion because the Republicans have spent decades locking up states legislature and gerrymandering the districts.
And that brings me back to the original question -- would it take 50 years to restore Roe? Well, firstly, I’d like to challenge the question itself. Is it that we want to restore Roe, which was a decision made by 7 justices in 1973, or is it that we want to create a more democratic society where the right to bodily autonomy is seen as a basic human right in all the states? Personally, I think it’d be better to actually have something that enshrines reproductive rights (and so many other rights) in law, or, even better, in the Constitution, than relying on who happens to be in the Supreme Court at the moment.
And yeah, the long way around *will* probably take 50 years. But (a) when we get there, we’ll have *actually* gotten there -- a constitutional amendment, or a bill that’s passed by a healthy majority in Congress, or >30 states that actually have abortion protections, and (b) we’ll have reaped SO MANY windfalls along the way, in terms of local and state level change.
This stuff takes time, but it is WORTH IT.
