The issue is not Roe vs. Wade. The issue is can one human being claim that her (or his) body is more important than the body of someone else — “someone else” meaning another human being who is innocent and helpless? In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Joel Hylton, a physician in Thomasville, N.C., wrote: “Who can say that the fetus is not alive and is not a separate genetic entity? Its humanity…also cannot be questioned scientifically. It is certainly of no other species. That it is dependent on another makes it qualitatively no different from countless other humans outside the womb.”

Kathleen Parker, writing in the Times-Republican (May 5, 2022) changed her mind about abortion when she became pregnant. “It was clear to me that I was a mere vessel for this other autonomous life growing inside me and my job was to protect him. Sure, it was my body but it was his life. Whereupon, I came, for lack of a better term, pro-life.”

If Roe vs. Wade is overturned or if it is not, it will make little difference. Persons who want an abortion will find a way to get one – even if there’s the inconvenience of crossing a state line here or there. The only thing that will make a difference will be for all of us, religious and non-religious, to wake up to the fact that civilized people, women or men, don’t arbitrarily extinguish human life.

Dr. Hylton adds: ”It strikes me that to argue that one may take an innocent life to preserve the quality of life of another is cold and carries utilitarianism to an obscene extreme. Nowhere else in our society is this permitted or even thinkable — although abortion sets a frightening prospect.”