The joy of juristocracy

re: "How the G.O.P. Might Get to Yes on Replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg" (The New York Times, September 20, 2020)

Mr. Douthat is right that decisions about the law of the land should properly be debated and made by legislators, not judges.

He is right that abortion should not have been legalized by a Supreme Court decision. Whilst the legal basis of Roe v. Wade is sound, it was a bad way to settle the abortion issue for a nation, and shows the harm of allowing religious convictions to run rampant over moral reasoning.

Douthat is wrong that abortion should not be legal. Abortion, the killing of a living human being before birth, should have been enshrined as every woman's right to have a safe, easy abortion on request by legislation enacted by politicians.

The religiously inclined are at liberty to not do what they think wrong for supernatural reasons, but until those supernatural reasons can be proved naturally true, they may not be used to as reasons for making law. Belief in souls, however sincere, cannot be a relevant reason to dictate limitations on the liberty of others to live their lives.

A foetus is as much a living being as is a pig, chicken or fish. A foetus beyond several weeks has a heart beat as much as does a cow, duck or lamb. But a living human foetus with a heart beat is never any more a person, human or otherwise, than are any of the animals we kill to snack on, so whatever the emotional pulls, there is no morally sound reason to treat the human foetus any differently than we treat any animal that we humans regularly kill to eat. 

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/opinion/republican-supreme-court.html#commentsContainer&permid=109214403:109214403