Abortion Policy

Start with a basic idea: your body is your own. Pregnancy changes a woman's health, her body, her work, and her whole future, so the choice to continue it or end it should be hers, not the government's. As the dissenting justices in Dobbs warned, without this right the government could 'control a woman's body' and shape 'the course of a woman's life.' This is also about equality. Only women can get pregnant, and when the state forces a woman to give birth, it can block her path through school and work and derail the life she planned. Real freedom means she decides. The evidence is strong. One famous study, the Turnaway Study, followed women who sought abortions -- some got them, some were turned away for being too far along -- and the women who were denied an abortion 'experienced an increase in household poverty lasting at least four years.' They also ended up with more debt and lasting money troubles. Childbirth is also riskier than abortion. Women who were denied an abortion 'reported more life-threatening complications like eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage' -- dangerous seizures and heavy bleeding. In the study, two of them died after giving birth; none died from an abortion. Banning abortion doesn't remove the need for it -- most abortions happen early, long before a fetus could live on its own -- it just makes the procedure harder and more dangerous, and that falls hardest on women with the least money. Protecting access lets each woman follow her own conscience and keep control of her life.

Start with the unborn child. When egg and sperm join, a new human life begins. Scientists who study the embryo note that this fusion 'clearly produces a new cell type, the zygote or one-cell embryo' -- a new, living, and distinct human organism. As the philosopher Robert George puts it, 'a human embryo is a whole living member of the species Homo sapiens in the earliest stage of his or her natural development.' It is not part of the mother's body -- it is a separate human being at the very start of life. If that is true, the unborn child has the same basic right to life as the rest of us, and the first job of a just society is to protect its weakest members. A fetus cannot speak or defend itself, and abortion ends that life -- to this side, that is the worst kind of harm, one that few reasons can outweigh. There is also the question of who decides. For decades, judges who were never elected set one abortion rule for the whole country. In Dobbs, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution 'does not confer a right to abortion' and returned the issue 'to the people and their elected representatives.' Now voters and lawmakers in each state can choose to protect unborn life. This side also notes that most people reject 'anything goes.' Very few Americans want abortion legal in every case, right up to birth. A society can respect women and still hold a firm line -- it can say that ending an unborn human life is wrong, and worth limiting by law.