Against Abortion

But also against prosecuting women who have one

Abortion is the culture wars’ sole constant—other moral issues come and go, but the enduring presence of the abortion debate is a testament to how culturally thorny this issue has been for half a century. I haven’t written about abortion in some time, so this piece will have a sprawling feel to it.

I want to use my Arc colleague Nicholas Grossman’s sharp essay from earlier this week as a jumping off point in at least two respects: first, to directly address the question of what necessarily follows from the view that abortion constitutes murder, and second, to push back against the socially prominent idea that what makes anti-abortion laws so bad is that they violate bodily autonomy.