Marcia Meoli: Good job. You ended Roe. Can we finally talk about reducing unwanted pregnancy?

Supporters of the anti-abortion political movement finally achieved the end of Roe v. Wade — something they wanted for almost 50 years. They tried everything to get this.  They honestly spoke of their religious convictions about abortion, and, when that didn’t work, they said anything and did anything to get their goal. In the end, they sold out to a repulsive demagogue who shared little of their values and who attempted to destroy much of our government. But they got what they wanted, an overrule of Roe.

Justice Alito stated that abortion was not a word used in the Constitution and was not a right that was deeply rooted in the nation’s history, so therefore the right does not exist. It is correct that abortion is not a word in the Constitution. As Gloria Steinman and others point out, neither is the word “woman.”

“Abortion” is also not a word in the Bible. When I look for the biblical basis for an anti-abortion stand, I see Jeremiah 1:5, where God says he knew Jeremiah before he was born. David wrote that God knew him before he was born. Psalm 139:13, 16. There are other citations about situations where a woman is pregnant. But nowhere is there an explicit condemnation of abortion in these passages, like there is of other behaviors. To get there, the believer needs to extrapolate that God would condemn such a thing. Anti-abortion Christians have done this extrapolation.

Followers of significant portions of Judaism have not. I see clear Jewish scholarship supporting the view that human life begins at birth, not conception. This may not be true throughout Judaism, but is true for significant numbers of Jewish people. Many Christians see Jews as their spiritual predecessors, so this cannot simply be “dismissed,” even from a Christian perspective.

I have listened to people in our community who have the religious belief that human life begins at conception, that abortion is murder and who then support the anti-abortion political movement to make abortion illegal because of that. I do not doubt their religious sincerity. They see abortion as a problem. For their own lives, they should live their religious beliefs to the fullest. How this relates to public policy and laws for our country is not the same. We are not a Christian democracy.

I also know there are many pro-abortion voters, including me while I was of child-bearing age, who would not have an abortion. I know of no one who thinks abortion is an outright good thing or even a good method of birth control.

So, if most of us see abortion as a public health problem, then we as a country could have spent the past 50 years discussing how to solve that problem. Perhaps we would approach it with something like the nursing process: assessment, diagnosis, outcome/planning, implementation and evaluation.

Assessment and diagnosis could have identified unwanted pregnancies as the root cause of the problem. Then we could worked together to plan effective and widespread contraception and other public health methods. Then we could have allocated resources to get this done. Then we could have evaluated our work and whether it reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions. We could have kept at it until we reduced the number of abortions to a minuscule level. At the end, we could have celebrated how we came together to solve that problem.

Instead, we endured an approximately 50-year quasi-religious crusade to eliminate the right and “save those babies.” At the same time, anti-abortion groups typically oppose contraception efforts that would eliminate the problem in the first place and blamed the females for being irresponsible.

Will we have a responsible public health discussion about this, now that they have won? If we do, I will be pleasantly surprised. The concurring opinion from Justice Thomas does not give me hope. For him, this is just the beginning of rolling back the clock on human rights in this country.

Neither does the attempt to deny that a 10-year-old rape victim traveled recently from Ohio to Indiana with her parents to get an abortion because it was illegal to get one in her home state. It would be great to see the anti-abortion political movement take their victory and engage honestly about this issue and in a way that does not further alienate people in need during difficult times. As a friend said about another issue recently, I am not holding my breath.

— Community Columnist Marcia Meoli is a Holland attorney and resident. Contact her at Meolimarcia@gmail.com. 

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Marcia Meoli: Good job. You ended Roe. Can we finally talk about reducing unwanted pregnancy?