The Anti Defamation League has an interesting take on Roe V Wade, and the fight to keep abortion legal in the US. Its a simple, yet compelling pro choice argument.

When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its water­shed deci­sion forty-three years ago in Roe v. Wade, it staked out a zone of pri­vacy around each woman’s right to deter­mine whether to con­tinue a preg­nancy. While assailed repeat­edly in the decades since, and at times reviewed and sub­jected to revi­sion, this essen­tial sphere of per­sonal auton­omy has stood the test of time. The Court’s recog­ni­tion of the right to access an abor­tion reflects its appre­ci­a­tion of the inti­macy of this deci­sion. The choice to con­tinue or ter­mi­nate a preg­nancy encom­passes deeply pri­vate con­sid­er­a­tions of phys­i­cal and men­tal health, per­sonal cir­cum­stance, fam­ily plan­ning, and finan­cial and edu­ca­tional con­di­tions and goals.
Photo Credit Debra Sweet Flickr

And for many the deci­sion also includes con­tem­pla­tion of their core reli­gious con­vic­tions and per­sonal reli­gious val­ues. This point is fre­quently lost in the clamor and con­tention of America’s debate over repro­duc­tive free­dom. Too often the dis­pute is framed in binary terms, between per­sons of reli­gious faith who view abor­tion as mur­der and those who regard abor­tion as a woman’s right to con­trol their own bod­ies and decide the course of their own lives. The faith and reli­gious prin­ci­ples of those who choose to exer­cise their repro­duc­tive rights are rarely dis­cussed. When they are, it is too often through the eyes of anti-abortion extrem­ists who char­ac­ter­ize those who dis­agree with them as irreligious.

This depic­tion is as far-removed from real­ity as the claim these same abor­tion oppo­nents make to be the guardians of “women’s health” while depriv­ing mil­lions of women access to safe and secure facil­i­ties offer­ing the repro­duc­tive med­ical care they seek. The real­ity is that women who choose to ter­mi­nate their preg­nan­cies, and those who sup­port their right to do so, are often as reli­gious, faith­ful, and ded­i­cated to their spir­i­tual and moral prin­ci­ples as those who stand on the other side of the ide­o­log­i­cal divide.

Read more at the ADL