You can understand why, when the legality of restrictions on abortion came up before the Supreme Court this week in the Mississippi case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the arguments there as well as in the media were all about theoretical matters. At what age does the fetus become viable—that is, able to live outside the womb? Is the legality of abortion a matter for state law-makers or federal jurists? Do state laws like Mississippi’s restricting abortion to the first fifteen weeks of pregnancy create an “undue burden” (in the language of Planned Parenthood v. Casey of 1992) on the exercise of the constitutional right to an abortion first discovered by the authors of Roe v. Wade in 1973? Above all, has legal abortion contributed to women’s political or economic equality with men? It was on the assumption that freely available abortion would contribute to such equality that …