Preaching to the choir here, but maybe some of you will find a clear, logical expression of the reasoning behind Roe helpful in expressing your support.
I think it's important not just to make a general case that choice is good, but also to support the reasoning behind the Roe decision itself. This is because I think that the legal basis behind Roe is widely perceived as weaker than it actually is. Sound familiar? "I'm pro-choice but I think that Roe was an activist decision and it should be up to the states." If that isn't familiar than you need to get out of your left-wing bubble and talk to more moderates and Republicans. Practically every pro-choice Republican thinks that Roe was a bad decision and that "it should be up to the state."
Their view has a sort of dialectical appeal to it, but I think it is plainly wrong. If an embryo or a fetus has sufficient moral considerability, then you should not be pro-choice. On the other hand, if an embryo or fetus does not have sufficient moral considerability, then no government, state, federal or otherwise has any business banning abortion.
Here, more or less is an argument that I think reflects the reasoning behind the Roe decision:
premise 1: If the government does not have a compelling interest in banning an activity then it is a violation of constitutionally protected liberty to do so.
premise 2: If the government has a compelling interest in banning the termination of early pregnancy then the embryo has moral considerability.
premise 3: The fertility clinic fire example (see below) shows that embryos do not have moral
considerability; ie, since one would choose to save a child over an arbitrary number of embryos, the moral considerability of an embryo is an infinitesimal fraction of that of a child.
conclusion 1: By modus tollens on p2 and p3, the government does not have a compelling interest in regulating termination of pregnancy in its early stages.
conclusion 2: By modus ponens on c1 and p1, it violates constitutionally protected liberty to do regulate the termination of pregnancy in its earliest stages.
Premise 1 is just a statement of Supreme Court precedent, particularly Griswald vs. Connecticut. The constitution protects individual liberty, including rights that are not even enumerated explicitly in the 9th ammendment. In Griswold it was determined that privacy is an unenumerated right, since without privacy we can't have liberty. If the government can meddle in our business, banning things like contraception, then are we really free?
Premise 2 just follows immediately from the fact that there has to be a moral consideration for the government to have a legitimate interest. That's true, since otherwise the government's action is arbitrary. Can the government ban sit-ups and push-ups? No. There's no moral consideration and hence no compelling state interest in banning it. To do so would be to arbitrarily meddle in our business.
Premise 3 is the most immediately controversial. I think, however, that an example that has been making the rounds lately makes a pretty definitive case that embryos do not have moral considerability. A google search turned up reference to this argument in a 2004 Harvard Magazine article. The fertility clinic fire example forces a strong intuition that embryos do not have moral considerability.
Suppose you are a firemen. A fertility clinic is fire-bombed. You are faced with a forced choice between saving five embryos or one two year old girl. Which do you choose?
You can expect, when faced with this scenario, pro-life activists to do anything but answer the dilemma directly. They'll fuss over the example, but the details of the example don't matter except that it is a forced choice: one or the other but not both can be saved. Ultimately, the refusal to answer the question directly indicates that they share the obvious intuition but don't like the implication of their intuition.
The entire question here rests on balancing the interests of human persons with the interests of embryos. Of course, the development from embryo to person is continuous, so there's moral ambiguity during later stages of development. To me, it seems reasonable that embryos have considerabley less than 1/5 the moral considerability of human persons. That's just my intuition on the clinic-fire example. Do you share the intuition? Who doesn't? I, in fact, would have difficulty choosing to save 1,000, 10,000, or even a billion embryos against the interests of a child screaming in flames.
The standard of "viability" is a pretty reasonable place to begin to weigh the interests of the developing fetus morally, to begin to say that society has some say in how it is treated, that it's the sort of thing you should put up to a vote. The Roe decision notes that this standard has resonance with the traditional acceptance of abortion up to the "quickening" or roughly when the fetus moves. A concession to the pro-lifers: I think it is about time for the SC to revisit the definition of "viability" in light of medical knowledge that has been obtained since the Roe decision, though I'm not an expert on that.
In summary, the Roe viability standard is well reasoned. Certainly, in the first weeks of pregnancy it is extremely difficult to argue that the embryo has moral considerability, unless you will assert that you would choose to save very few embryos rather than a burning child. Thus, even if the specific legal definition of viability is pushed to some time in the second term, there remains no compelling state interest in regulating medical procedures to terminate pregnancy in the early stages of development.
Crossposted