National news outlets are abuzz with articles about abortion in Arizona. In September 2022, state courts, working in the wake of the Dobbs decision earlier that year, lifted injunctions (put in place following the Roe decision in 1973) against laws criminalizing almost all abortions. The injunctions were later reinstated, but Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, medical director at a pro-life pregnancy center headquartered in Glendale, worked with Alliance Defending Freedom to petition the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse the reinstatement. After Dr. Hazelrigg won his case in early April, the Arizona Supreme Court duly ordered the original law to be enforced, effectively banning abortion in Arizona.

Many outlets reacted to the pro-life victory with open contempt. “1864” became the theme of the media’s mockery. The law that the Arizona Supreme Court ordered upheld, ARS 13-3603, was originally passed in 1864 (and later amended). Therefore, many pundits and reporters alleged, Arizona was condemning women to strictures dating back in time to the last full year of the Civil War, decades before Arizona was even a state. Drudge Report lampooned the news with an image of a woman in a Civil-War-era hoop skirt. This site—which features images of a black woman dressed in a Handmaid’s Tale outfit and holding a basket of cotton—was even more demeaning.

Faced with a barrage of media scorn, some Republicans distanced themselves from the sixteen-decade exercise in time travel. Kari Lake, running in Arizona for the U.S. Senate this year, said that reviving the 1864 near-ban did not reflect the will of the people. (She later revised that statement.) Donald Trump, presumptive Republican nominee for the presidency, also chided Arizona over its pro-life stance. (He, too, backpedaled thereafter.) As has happened so many times before, politicians lost their nerve when calls to continue the killing of children got loud and aggressive. The punchline about the “1864” legislation made it nigh impossible for politicians to argue in favor of any law protecting the weakest members of society, regardless of what year it was passed.

What struck me at first as I watched the “1864” narrative unfold in the press—apart from the media’s callous indifference to the unborn—was the inbuilt progressivism of it all. I discovered that, instinctively, many Americans recoil at the notion of looking to the past for wisdom. What happened yesterday is archaic; what happened in the 1860s Stone Age. This American horror at anything short of racing full tilt into the shiny future was also on display during the Dobbs fallout two years ago. The country was retrogressing, becoming a theocracy, critics bemoaned. And that was because the 2022 Supreme Court decision set the judicial clock back fifty years. Going back over a hundred years before Roe strikes many Americans as unthinkable. There is only forward progress, the American ethos seems to declare, and progress, almost by definition, comes only by marching relentlessly to the hard left.

But as I began to dig deeper, I saw that things are much more complex than they appear in the “1864” stories about Arizona’s abortion laws. Americans, who express a studied disdain for the past, ironically seem to have a very poor understanding of their own country’s history (a problem certainly explained by the knee-jerk progressivism described above). In many instances, the stark divide between “now” and “then” isn’t so stark at all. History doesn’t repeat itself so much as it never really changes in the first place. For example, the assumption that 1864 America was more straitlaced and prudish than its 2024 counterpart is in many ways false. For one thing, just because a law is on the books doesn’t mean it was enforced. And just because a state outlaws abortion doesn’t mean that legislators wanted to protect the unborn. Arizona’s 1864 law, Vox writer Nicole Narea argues, was part of a raft of legislation passed around that time by territories seeking to demonstrate that their medical licensing laws were on a par with those in the United States, thereby strengthening their eventual case for statehood. Women in 1864, and before, aborted their children with appalling frequency.

But there is more to the 1864 question than historical ignorance in the present day. The messiness of 1864—to say nothing of the wholesale slaughter on the battlefield at the time, which raises a whole other set of questions about how much our forebears valued human life—leads me to a very different conclusion than that of many commentators today. Then and now, democracy has been a very dangerous paradigm for children in the womb. In 1864 (as in 2024), politics all too often took precedence over considerations involving unborn children. The difference is that in 1864 abortion laws were rarely enforced. In 2024, ultrasound and other technologies, coupled with a decades-long fight by prolifers advocating for children in the womb, have made it much harder to maintain the old-fashioned hypocrisy about abortion. Society—and especially legislators and law-enforcement officers—can’t as easily look the other way as children are dismembered in utero. And so abortion bans, once skirted, are now promptly overturned. In both cases, though, democracy has not helped the unborn. Recall the Dobbs decision. In 2022, the United States Supreme Court remanded the abortion question to the several states. Since then, as we have seen in state after state, democracy has simply allowed legislatures to overrule whatever advances prolifers made between 1973 and 2022. If democracy, or more precisely, voters, have made any moral progress between 1864 and 2024, one would hardly know it by examining how laws are made and (not) enforced. In other words, for all their hard charging into the future, progressives on abortion have ended up right back where the country was when Abraham Lincoln was president, namely, hard-hearted towards babies not yet delivered.

And therein lies the rub. Democracy is dangerous for babies because babies do not vote. As long as the humanity of the unborn is a political question, one to be decided at the ballot box, it seems likely that the American electorate will go on choosing its own convenience over the lives of those who have no say in our much-vaunted democracy.