For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one’s genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

Once you pass into the utilitarianism of abortion, where do you go? Why do you kill an unborn child after six months and not old people or not criminals or not just every second person in the world?

When you peel back the layers of the anti-choice motivation, it always comes back to two things: What is the nature and purpose of human sexuality? And second, what is the role of women in the world? Sex and the role of women are inextricably linked, because if you can separate sex from procreation, you have given women the ability to participate in society on an equal basis with men.

This plague of abortion is the mark of a society that has lost its way; it treats children like garbage. It has come about because of the so-called sexual revolution; abortion is almost a sacrament of that revolution. Sex has been completely separated from its purpose, which is to create life. Our sex-saturated society teaches kids that sex is for fun, for pleasure, for self-expression, or for conquest. Abortion is a no-fault sex insurance policy. This has made a mockery of any attempt at maintaining strong families--the love and responsibility people have toward each other. Now society is full of rampant individualism.

If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwanted government intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision to bear or beget a child.

Whether abortion is an expression of negative or positive conscience is a serious question with enormous consequences. If looked at from the point of view of the aborted fetus, it is an aggressive act of the strongest sort, causing its destruction. Considered from the side of the pregnant woman, it is simply not requiring her to carry her pregnancy to full term, in circumstances where in her opinion that would be inappropriate. However, the fact that the arguments can be made on both sides does not mean that the choice between them can be made arbitrarily by the toss of a coin or even that it is morally marginal. As I see it, the answer is based on the natural order itself. In this sense, what we have first to take into account is the fact that until viability the mother and fetus have to share the mother's body (using it in different ways). Most important is the fact that the only conscience is that of the mother. Since the freedom of this conscience is in question, the only viewpoint until viability can be that of this conscience, so that the issue is whether this conscience can be forced to act in a way contrary to its beliefs, viz., to continue a pregnancy which for perceived good reasons of conscience has become unwanted.

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