Even though the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits a state religion and prohibits the state from making religious beliefs illegal, early Supreme Court opinions used the phrase “separation of Church and State” to put a wall between religion and state. We can see the wisdom of this by looking at the lives of people living in places like Pakistan, India, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia today or, like our founders did, almost any European country during the Middle Ages. Our founders created a country ruled by laws to minimize deceit, theft and murder with minimal impact on people’s rights.
Abortion is a moral issue. It’s moral because science does not tell us when life begins or when a clump of cells becomes human. In the absence of science, people turn to religion or philosophy for answers to moral questions, and various religions have various answers to the above two questions. Abortion can be considered murder only if a law is in force defining a fetus as a person — legislating morality, if you will.
Religious beliefs, even if passionately held, are just opinions. This means to me that any law regarding abortion should have minimal impact on people’s rights, be based on science and reason, and should not favor one religious opinion over another. I think we’d all agree that something that survives a human birth is both human and alive. The nature of that something before birth is a matter of opinion.
— Mark Desinger
Anchorage
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