In the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito placed the question of abortion morality at the center of abortion politics and unleashed the literal tyranny of a profoundly patriarchal "personhood" theology upon female Americans. (We use "female" here to refer specifically to those with female reproductive capacity, who may identify across the gender spectrum.) Regaining political liberty means, in part, fighting this culture war. But first we have to understand it.
In his opinion in the Dobbs case, Alito writes: "What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion is different because it destroys what Roe termed 'potential life' and what the law challenged in this case calls 'an unborn human being.' None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion."
