The great battle over abortion is finally upon us. In Roe v. Wade, justices argued that there was no evidence of when life begins. Over the past couple of decades, science and medicine have made known with crystal clarity that human life begins at the moment of fertilization. This has caused the other side to switch tactics and declare that we don't know when a human organism becomes a human person.

Now they need to eat that argument and justify it against the same reasoning that Democrats, north and south, made to justify slavery, to deny personhood status for blacks post-civil war with poll taxes, literacy tests and segregation. They can justify it against the great Democrat FDR and his internment camps for Japanese and Japanese Americans. They can justify it against the Nuremberg Laws that denied personhood status for Jews in Nazi Germany. They can justify it against forced sterilizations of the developmentally disabled by the state in the US.

Make them justify how personhood status is consistently denied to whole classes of human beings in this nation and often aided and abetted by the Supreme Court of the United States in rulings such as Dred Scott (slavery), Plessy vs. Ferguson (segregation), Buck v. Bell (sterilization), and Koramatsu v. United States (internment camps).

It is not enough to embrace abortion simply because SCOTUS said so. If anyone suggests that, challenge them to embrace the 4 rulings above, in the name of consistency in their belief that the Supreme Court never makes immoral rulings. If they concede that the other rulings were immoral, then revert to there being no distinction in Roe: Personhood status is being denied to what everyone accepts is a human organism.

Finally, if they reject all the other decisions, but embrace abortion, then why can't Americans exercise choice in these other cases if they don't see any immorality in them. What of choice?

Chris LaRose

Potsdam