Frank's Musings

Besides Abortion Limitation, there are other examples of liberal democratic laws that enforce faith-based rules. These include Sunday Holidays and liquor sales restrictions, inclusion of religious activities in the tax exemption awarded to charities and other public services, acceptance of religious belief to justify conscientious objector status, etc.

However, are these concessions to a person’s freedom to honor principles of spiritual rectitude commensurate with the Dobbs decision to eliminate the Court’s nationwide grant of a woman’s personal freedom to obtain an abortion? On one hand, this USSC dictum seems to use the anomaly of America’s federal system as a convenient way to pass the buck on a controversial issue. Notwithstanding, it apparently was not intended to have given the authority to determine national policy to state legislatures or to lower courts. On the other hand, the Supreme Court’s effective codification of the imposition of a religious belief held by any state’s majority on all others in that state is different from the other examples of special legal treatment for religion cited above.

It concerns a woman’s control, to the extent physically and philosophically possible, over her own body. Her body is commonly believed to be her single most essential identity. How dare a system of artificial laws, not to mention a bench of jurists, interfere in that personal process?