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I reviewed the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling last time, and also noted that Justice Byron White’s dissent argued that it was a mistake for the majority to find a right to privacy in the 14th amendment.

What would have been the consequences if Justice White’s dissent had been the majority decision?

It would have meant that laws governing abortion would have been left to the states in all their varied versions, with some states not having any laws regarding abortion at all.

Following Justice White’s view might have been acceptable except for the fact that numerous state legislatures had already enacted anti-choice laws.

Moreover, those states ignored then and do now the real reason women should have the right to choose.

That right is rooted in nature, in a woman’s natural, God given ability to make decisions for herself about herself, just as men do.

It doesn’t take a right to privacy for our society to support the freedom of men to make decisions for themselves about themselves.

There is no rational basis for not giving women the same right.

Any argument for not accepting that right comes down to this…chauvinism.

Chauvinism is “an attitude that the members of your own sex are always better than those of the opposite sex.”

That, I believe, accurately describes what lies behind anti-choice laws. More to the point, they are laws promoted by people who don’t want a woman to have the freedom to make a decision they don’t want her to make. They know better.

What they argue, of course, is that they are speaking on behalf of the unborn.

But what they are really doing is trying to legislate morality, a very, very bad basis for public policy that leads governments into a similar debacle religions have found themselves in by trying to legislate morality for their members.

People want the right to make moral decisions for themselves. What is more, trusting they can is the only practical way to function as a society or group. Otherwise you have the tyranny of a person or group telling everyone else what they can and cannot do.

The Court didn’t ignore the moral issues involved in abortion, and in fact acknowledged the various moral views on the issue at the beginning of the ruling, choosing in the end to balance freedom of choice with moral limits. It had no other choice because states had already proven that they were unwilling to seek such a balance.

So for me it is easy and right to support freedom of choice because I believe a woman knows her life, her circumstances, her physical and mental state. and everything else she needs to know to choose what path she will follow rather than the state choosing for her.

After all, we live in a democracy, not a theocracy, and, thus, in regard to abortion we have chosen to trust freedom over intervention, even if that freedom does have reasonable limits.

But I am confident anti-abortion individuals and groups will not agree.

Next time I will explain why they won’t and why I believe they are wrong.