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Once again American women have saved our democracy.

Last night women in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania (and the men who support them) voted for their right to make decisions about their own bodies and NO ONE ELSE.

There is no more fundamental right than that. As a man, I get to make health-care decisions for myself. No one else.

Women are saying emphatically they have the exact same right. That is what last night’s election results clearly said, and it was a major victory for today’s American democracy that rests on the presumption that all men and women are created equal.

The issue was not about abortion, as the news media said. It was about democracy. It was because it was about choice, about who gets to decide what a woman should do once she is pregnant. That goes to the heart of what living in a democracy means.

Of course, a decision to end a pregnancy should be informed and carefully considered, but at the end of the day voters who cherish democracy said the decision belongs to the woman, not politicians, not the church, not the state, not the Supreme Court, not any form or expression of autocracy or tyranny. 

Roe v. Wade said that society has the right to put reasonable limitations on the right to choose, but even those limits, the 1973 Supreme Court said, are secondary to the right of a woman to make any decision about her own body for herself.

That’s all it comes down to, whether or not democracy means equal rights under the law for everyone, or for some and not others.

Those who want to make a woman’s right to choose illegal hav chosen the anti-democratic position that women’s rights stop the day they become pregnant. From that point on they are the property of the state and it gets to decide what they can and cannot do with their bodies.

That fits autocracies, but not democracies, not least because it is both an assault of and insult to women when the state declares that pregnant women aren’t smart enough or moral enough or wise enough to make good decisions for themselves.

Second, the state deciding what women can and cannot do ignores an obvious truth that any and all decisions about our bodies, including pregnancy, are and always will be subjective.

What has happened since the court struck down Roe in 2022 proves the point. State politicians have been all over the map in regard to laws they have passed taking away a woman’s right to choose, from a complete ban to six weeks to eight weeks to fifteen weeks, to mention the most common ones.

What this wide diversity of laws reflects is exactly what I am saying, that the right to choose is subjective. It cannot be any other way because it involves human judgments.

There is nothing objective about a pregnancy, and certainly about ending one. The right to choose means accepting the difficult responsibility of making the final decision as best one can, given a multitude of facts and feelings and unknowns to consider.

Thus far, all across the country women voters and the men who support them have said loudly and unequivocally that this subjective decision belongs to the woman who is pregnant. No one else, period.

You may be a Bible quoting Christian, a Koran bound Muslim, a Torah committed Jew, a politician, a judge, a justice, or a candle-stick maker, it doesn’t matter. Thanks to the leadership of women, the majority of voters are saying you’re not the one who gets to make this subjective decision.

What is more, they will keep on saying it until they don’t have to say it anymore, and based on what has happened in a year and a half since Dobbs was handed down, that day may be coming sooner rather than later. 

Even better, the closer we get to it, the firmer the ground on which our democracy was founded becomes.