Since 1975, Gallup polls document that fewer than 20 percent of Americans believe a woman’s right to choose an abortion should be banned in all cases. This small, but vocal, minority reports to be defending the right of a fetus to a life it cannot yet sustain outside the host’s body.

The most vocal of these rights defenders are often in the same places where a citizen’s right to choose not to wear a mask, or get a vaccination, amid a global pandemic, is applauded. Are they also the defenders of a citizen’s right to carry weapons designed specifically to kill another human being?

I wonder, then, in the issue of a woman’s right to choose whether or not she will host a fetus to a point at which it is capable of sustaining life, how the rights of this tissue superseded the rights of the woman, serving as host. Likewise, I am also curious how the rights of those, amid a pandemic, to refuse a mask or vaccine outweigh the rights of their neighbors, colleagues and family to live without exposure to a disease that has already killed 750,000 Americans. Or how a citizen’s right to carry a deadly weapon outweighs a living child’s right not to be killed in a classroom, grocery store or nightclub.

Will the same conservative judges, deciding whether or not to protect the rights of fetal tissue over the rights of its host, also recognize the rights the majority of us have to life amid a global pandemic – or an ongoing epidemic of gun violence?

Steve Kelley
Kennebunk

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