In most countries, there is no constitutional right to abortion. Here in Australia, abortion is legal nationwide - but there is not and has never been any constitutional right to it; it went from illegal to legal, mostly due to state-by-state legislative reform, in a few cases assisted by non-constitutional state court decisions, such as the 1971 NSW District Court case which decided that the crime of abortion did not include an abortion performed by a medical practitioner with a good faith belief that it was clinically indicated-that decision was non-constitutional, it was purely an exercise in statutory interpretation, and the state Parliament could have easily overturned it by amending the legislation if they had disagreed with it. And, I think Australia is more representative of the average country with legal abortion than the US under Roe v Wade ever was.

There’s an argument that by prematurely removing a controversial social issue from the democratic process, rather than letting that process run its natural course, Roe turned abortion into a much bigger “political hot potato” in the US than it is in most other countries. I think some version of that argument is probably right-in a timeline in which Roe had gone the other way, probably more US states would have legal abortion today than they do in this one. Roe motivated opponents of legal abortion to fight back in a way that a bunch of state-by-state legislative defeats probably never would have.