Abortion involves ALL the unanswerable questions in Philosophy.
That’s why it must remain a matter of choice.
I am passionately pro-choice, but not because I think the anti-choice advocates are all liars and fools. There are people on both sides of this issue that think the answer is obvious, and can be found by consulting common sense and/or scientific fact. For several years, I taught a course on abortion that was designed to destroy this self-confidence, by showing how confusing this topic is when you think clearly about it. That is the strongest argument for why this is really a religious question, and why the state has no business making this decision for anyone else. My uncertainty does not weaken my commitment to the pro-choice position. On the contrary, it is because the issues can’t be easily resolved either way that having an abortion must remain a matter of personal choice: Not because the question is simple but because it is too complicated for anyone to be sure what the right answer is.
That was the conclusion of Roe v. Wade and the cases that built on that precedent: The science cannot settle the issue, because it is a religious not a scientific question. Therefore, if the government outlaws abortion, it violates the separation of Church and State. In the majority argument for Roe v. Wade, Justice Blackmun wrote:
We did not resolve the difficult issue when human life begins. With those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology or unable to…