The choice

There's not much, really, I can say that won't be said elsewhere with a finer degree of eloquence and relevance.

Thirty-three years ago today, the Supreme Court recognized that a woman's pregnancy and health is a private matter, and that government intervention into that relationship is unconstitutional because it invades her personal liberty and freedom, violating the Fourteenth Amendment.

Today we don't know if the two newest justices (obligatory if Alito is confirmed here) truly consider Roe v. Wade settled law, or if they will manage to sway court opinion in their favor to overturn the case or place further restrictions on access to abortion that, for all intents and purposes, outlaw the procedure by making it incredibly hard to get.

It's a scary prospect, and one that doesn't seem too far-fetched.

It certainly seems like trumpeting freedom and liberty while chipping away at the practical implications of both is very in right now for many conservatives and even libertarians, who readily (and hypocritically) admit that they are libertarian because of just such personal liberty issues. I understand the push to see abortion just go away, poof, because, for most people, it is a frustrating and devastating thing to think about.

But in all sincerity: Butt out. There is no reason that the government — state or federal — should even think it is within their realm of power to decide which health and pregnancy options should be open to women. And there is no reason for good conservatives and libertarians to back such desperate freedom-abusing policies. So just butt out. Leave the pregnant woman's medical decisions to her and her doctor. And let the doctor do his/her job without micromanagement from the government, whose real intention is to hog-tie doctors until they are just policy arms in white coats.

It is none of your business what any woman — your wife, your mother, your sister, your adult daughter included — decides to do about her pregnancy. Let women make pregnancy decisions on their own, consulting whomever they wish, and if you feel they have made a grave moral error, just hope that your God of choice deals with them after death. Because it's none of your business. You have to accept that living in a free country means that a lot of people are going to do things that you think are wrong. But a woman's abortion does not impede your personal liberty.

Either the woman's liberty matters here, or the fetus's. It can't be both. And prizing the fetus's liberty over the woman's is a dangerous precedent to set. The woman — already a living, breathing human being with clearly defined life status and supposed autonomy over her body — and her freedom to take care of her body as she chooses is what the law protects. Any other law would need to value the life of a fetus over a grown human. And I don't think that's an area where the government should be directing traffic. Those are personal life decisions.

So butt out.

NPR has a collection of related stories here. (Hat tip: Women's Health News)

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