I thought this post at To Put It Bluntly on the diction of abortion activists of all stripes was something of a relief, being pretty even-handed and providing more light than heat. He did misstate the Catholic teaching on abortion, however.
This article by Jeannie Suk Gersen at The New Yorker on the other hand struck me as peculiar in not bearing much of either light or heat. I don’t believe that she understands “legitimacy”, however. I’ve got a post from long ago somewhere around here on legitimacy, authority, and authenticity which would explain the issues.
The Constitution and the Congress provide all of the legitimacy the Supreme Court needs and its main strength is that it’s authoritative. I think she’s calling for authenticity and nowadays authenticity is the enemy of authority. You can be authentic or you can be authoritative but you can’t be both.
I thought this piece by Prof. Blackman at Volokh captured the interesting quandry of the conservative legal movement. Its legitimacy derives from adhering to the least fungible inputs: text and original meaning. The persuasive power comes from the notion of removing courts from political questions. Putting aside the differences btw/ textualism and originalism, and whether other values can ever truly be removed from personal values, the situation of a 6-3 court puts the movement on the horns of a dilemma. Either abortion is removed from special Constitutional protection, which will put the Courts fully into the tumult of politics, or punt in some fashion, delegitimizing the virtues of textualism and originalism. Perhaps inauthentic phonies might be a better frame, but I suspect Roberts values the goal of depoliticizing the courts and thus will compromise. The other conservatives, I don’t know.
https://reason.com/volokh/2021/12/05/alicea-dobbs-and-the-fate-of-the-conservative-legal-movement/