Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could upend Roe v. Wade. At the very least, Dobbs vs. Jackson Women's Health Organization is the most significant challenge to legalized abortion to date. In question is a Mississippi law known as the Gestational Age Act. If the court decides the law should stand, the power to determine and limit abortion rights would effectively be returned to the states.
The long battle over abortion in America has had many chapters. For years, most advocates of legalized abortion argued they were not really pro-abortion. Abortion, they claimed, was not a good thing, but women should have the right to decide whether or not to carry a baby to term. The painful decision to have an abortion, continued the rhetoric, is always tragic, but a woman must retain autonomy over her own body and health.
The preferred label for these abortion advocates, "Pro-Choice," has always been problematic. For starters, a pre-born baby has distinct DNA and a separate body. So, abortion involves a body other than just the mother's, and her choice is made for someone else. The baby is not given a choice.
Remarkable advances in science and technology over the years eventually dismantled claims made by early abortion advocates that the preborn are not yet human. So, the assertion shifted: preborn humans are not persons. This raised the immediate and historically fraught question of who gets to decide which human beings are persons and which are not? What non-arbitrary criteria can be used to determine personhood? And how can such criteria be applied consistently in a world where one woman mourns a miscarriage, and another deliberately causes a miscarriage?