Borrowed Fire
Who actually owns morality — and what really changed American minds about abortion
People-powered, AI-Generated
AI-assisted draft, verified, and corrected: Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5
Edited and curated by: Guy Wolf
*Disclaimer: AI has been known to malfunction “hallucinate” therefore, a human-in-the-middle approach with a separate draft and verification AI has been used to provide the best quality, most accurate apolitical research on this topic
In 1973, a few days after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, reporters in Dallas went looking for outrage. They found W. A. Criswell instead. Criswell was not a marginal figure — he was the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church, Dallas, then the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the country. Asked about the ruling, he said something that would be almost unthinkable from an evangelical leader of his stature today: that a fetus only became “an individual person” after birth, separate from its mother, and that the decision seemed right to him.[^1]
Criswell wasn’t a lone eccentric. Two years earlier, in 1971, delegates (”messengers”) to the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution calling on Southern Baptists to work for laws allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, “clear evidence of severe fetal deformity,” and threats to a mother’s emotional, mental, or physical health. Messengers reaffirmed it in 1974, after Roe, calling it “a middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.”[^2] Surveys of Southern Baptist pastors around that time found roughly 70 percent approved of abortion to protect a mother’s health, and majorities approved in cases of rape or fetal deformity.[^3]
If you only know today’s religious landscape, this is disorienting. Opposition to abortion is now treated, by supporters and critics alike, as close to a defining marker of American evangelical and Catholic identity — and by many of its defenders, as something that flows directly and inevitably from scripture. So a fair question follows: if the biblical case against abortion is as plain as it’s now often presented, why did the largest Protestant denomination in America pass the opposite position, twice, in the early 1970s? And what actually changed?
That question turns out to be a good entry point into a bigger argument — one that shows up constantly in comment sections and family arguments alike: that nonreligious people cannot really have morality, because morality has to come from somewhere, and that “somewhere” has to be God. This piece is about untangling that claim, carefully, from both directions — what ethics and morals actually mean, whether secular people can ground them without borrowing from religion, and what the real, messy, well-documented history of the American anti-abortion movement can and can’t tell us about how much of this is really about scripture at all.
Start with definitions, because most of the argument is really a mix-up
“Ethics” and “morals” get used interchangeably in everyday speech, but philosophers draw a real distinction, and it matters here.
Morals (from the Latin mores, customs) usually refers to a person’s or a community’s actual beliefs about right and wrong — the internalized code someone lives by, often shaped by upbringing, culture, and religion.
Ethics (from the Greek ethos, character) usually refers to the systematic study of those beliefs — the philosophical discipline that asks what makes an action right or wrong, and why, and tries to build a defensible framework rather than just inherit one.
In practice: your morals are what you believe. Ethics is the discipline of examining whether those beliefs hold up, and building or choosing a framework — religious or secular — that can explain why. A religious believer and a secular philosopher can both “do ethics.” The dispute isn’t over whether one side has morals and the other doesn’t; it’s over what grounds those morals, and whether that grounding needs to be supernatural.
The actual argument, and where it runs into trouble
The claim in question usually has a few connected parts: (1) morality requires an objective, transcendent source; (2) only a deity can supply that; (3) therefore atheists and other nonbelievers cannot have real morality, only borrowed or arbitrary preferences; and sometimes (4) that even when secular thinkers cite pre-Christian philosophers like Aristotle, that’s illegitimate borrowing, because Aristotle’s system gestured at a “prime mover” and therefore counts as basically theistic.
Point one is a real, serious philosophical position, not a fringe idea — it deserves to be treated as such rather than dismissed. Point four, though, doesn’t survive contact with what Aristotle actually wrote. His unmoved mover, described in the Metaphysics, is a metaphysical explanation for why change happens in the universe at all — an eternal, impersonal principle of actuality that itself doesn’t act, will, judge, or command.[^4] It is not the personal, commanding God of Abrahamic monotheism, and Aristotle’s ethical system in the Nicomachean Ethics doesn’t derive its content from that unmoved mover at all. Aristotelian virtue ethics grounds right action in eudaimonia — human flourishing — achieved through the cultivation of stable character traits (virtues) discovered by observing what enables people and communities to thrive, arrived at through reason, not divine revelation.[^5] Treating Aristotle as a crypto-monotheist to disqualify secular people from citing him is a mistake about the actual text, not a real argument.
Fact, consensus, and speculation, held apart: It is an established fact that Aristotle wrote a virtue-based ethics grounded in human flourishing, not in the will of a personal god. It is expert consensus among ethicists that consequentialism (Bentham, Mill), deontology (Kant), contractualism (Hobbes, Rawls, Scanlon), and virtue ethics (Aristotle, and its modern revival by philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Alasdair MacIntyre) are all serious, internally coherent secular frameworks capable of producing binding moral conclusions without appeal to a deity.[^6] It is contested and speculative whether any of these frameworks can supply the kind of mind-independent, universally binding “objective” morality that some religious philosophers argue only a transcendent lawgiver can ground — this is a live and legitimate debate in academic philosophy, not a settled question either way.
That last point deserves real engagement, not a dunk. The strongest secular-vs-religious disagreement here is what philosophers call the moral argument for God’s existence, developed by thinkers like William Lane Craig: if objective moral values and duties exist, they need a transcendent grounding, and God is the best explanation for that grounding.[^7] Its classical counter, dating back over two thousand years, is the Euthyphro dilemma from Plato: is something good because God commands it (in which case morality is arbitrary — God could have commanded cruelty and it would be “good”), or does God command it because it’s already good (in which case goodness exists independently of God, and secular ethics can access it too)?[^8] Neither side has fully closed this argument in over two millennia of trying, which is itself informative: it means “nonbelievers can’t ground morality” is not settled fact, but one live position in an unresolved philosophical dispute — and it cuts against believers just as sharply as it cuts against atheists, since divine command theory has to answer Euthyphro too.
Checking an assumption most people never examine
Structured intelligence-analysis techniques exist to catch exactly this kind of unexamined premise. One is a Key Assumptions Check — naming a belief that most people on a given side simply take for granted, then testing it against evidence.
The assumption here: that moral behavior, historically and observably, actually requires religious belief. This is empirically testable, and the evidence doesn’t support it. Confucian ethics developed a rich, binding moral system centered on relational duty (ren, li) without a commanding personal deity.[^9] Buddhist ethics grounds moral conduct in reducing suffering and cultivating compassion, without positing a creator-lawgiver. Secular philosophical traditions, from Stoicism to contemporary effective altruism, have produced people who give away large fractions of their income, run into burning buildings, and refuse to lie under oath — the observable behaviors we call “moral” — without a religious framework generating them. None of this proves atheists are more moral than believers, and it shouldn’t be read that way; it simply falsifies the strict claim that moral behavior is causally or logically dependent on religious belief.
An unexpected lens: what biology says about where “should” comes from
Here’s a lens most treatments of this topic skip entirely: evolutionary biology, and specifically primatology. Primatologist Frans de Waal spent decades documenting behavior in chimpanzees and bonobos — consolation of losers after fights, food-sharing enforced by social pressure, protest against unequal treatment — and argued that the building blocks of morality (empathy, reciprocity, a sense of fairness, and even a rudimentary sense of communal norms) are older than religion and even older than humanity itself.[^10] His argument isn’t that chimps are moral philosophers, but that morality-as-a-capacity is likely an evolved feature of social species living in groups where cooperation outcompeted pure self-interest — meaning religion, on this account, is better understood as one of several cultural systems that organize and enforce a moral sense that already had biological roots, rather than the sole possible source of that sense.
Where this lens strains: it explains the origin of moral capacities — why humans have the equipment for empathy and fairness-sensing at all — but it doesn’t by itself settle the philosophical question of whether any particular moral claim is true or only evolutionarily useful. A trait’s evolutionary usefulness doesn’t automatically make it correct (this gap is sometimes called the “evolutionary debunking” problem, and it cuts against both religious and secular moral realists who want their moral claims to be more than useful fictions). It’s a genuinely illuminating data point, not a knockout argument for either side.
Two historical parallels: doctrine moving with politics, not just the other way around
Precedent one — the Catholic doctrine of “ensoulment” changed over time. For most of Catholic history, theologians including Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century held to a version of “delayed hominization” — the view, inherited from Aristotle via earlier theologians, that the fetus was not yet a full human person with a rational soul until some weeks into pregnancy (a position sometimes tied to “quickening,” when movement was first felt).[^11] It was Pope Pius IX, in 1869, who removed the distinction between the “unformed” and “formed” fetus from canon law regarding excommunication for abortion, effectively treating ensoulment as immediate from conception for the first time as settled Church policy.[^12] Where the parallel holds: it shows that even within a single, continuous religious tradition claiming to interpret one unchanging revealed truth, doctrine on this exact question moved substantially over eighteen centuries, in response to theological argument, in ways that complicate the claim that a strict from-conception position was always the plain, obvious biblical reading. Where it breaks down: doctrinal development within a tradition, guided by its own internal theological reasoning, is not automatically evidence of external political motive — Catholic theologians would rightly say 1869 reflected refined moral reasoning, not politics, and that reasoning deserves to be engaged on its own terms.
Precedent two — the American evangelical shift happened fast, and was contested even by conservative evangelicals at the time. The 1971–1979 span, sketched at the top of this piece, is the second precedent, and its causes are genuinely disputed among historians — which is worth walking through honestly rather than picking a side and hiding the fight.
Historian Randall Balmer, in Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (2021) and earlier work, argues that the real catalyst for the political mobilization of the religious right wasn’t abortion at all, but the IRS’s 1970–71 move (upheld in Green v. Connally) to strip tax-exempt status from racially segregated “segregation academies” like Bob Jones University — private Christian schools founded across the South partly in response to desegregation, which barred or restricted Black students. Balmer’s account holds that conservative strategists including Paul Weyrich later looked for a “more high-minded” unifying issue than defending school segregation, and landed on abortion, which by the late 1970s proved far more effective at building a mass coalition.[^13] This is a serious, published, extensively cited historical argument from a credentialed scholar of American evangelicalism, and it lines up with the documented timeline: the SBC’s own permissive resolutions in 1971 and 1974, and prominent evangelicals’ muted or approving reactions to Roe in 1973, fit awkwardly with a story where opposition to abortion was evangelicals’ core, scripturally-driven concern from the start.
But this thesis is genuinely contested, not settled consensus, and treating it as flatly proven overstates the evidence. Critics — including some sympathetic to Balmer’s broader point about racism’s real role in the movement’s coalition-building, and others more skeptical of his framing overall — argue the causal story is oversimplified: anti-abortion organizing (particularly among Catholics, who opposed Roe from the start) was already underway well before the segregation-academy fight reached its peak; the 1978 Iowa Senate race that first showed abortion’s electoral power predates some of the timeline Balmer’s account implies; and figures like Grover Norquist, whom Balmer himself quotes, place the catalytic moment specifically in the Carter administration’s 1978 proposal targeting Christian schools generally, not solely in defense of segregation.[^14] The honest summary: it is established fact that the IRS’s action against segregated Christian schools predates and substantially overlaps with the religious right’s political formation, and that white evangelical elites’ opposition to abortion hardened considerably later than popular memory suggests. It is contested historical interpretation — real scholars disagree — how much weight to put on race versus a genuine, if late-arriving, moral conviction about abortion as the primary driver once the movement did form.
Where both precedents converge: they complicate — without resolving — the claim that today’s politically intense anti-abortion position simply is what the Bible has always, obviously taught, and that everything else is a modern distraction from that plain reading. History suggests something messier: doctrine, politics, and genuine moral conviction moving together and influencing each other, in a specific documented sequence, rather than one pure, timeless religious position under political siege.
What the actual texts say — and where traditions genuinely diverge
The Hebrew Bible’s most directly relevant passage is Exodus 21:22–25, describing a case where men fighting accidentally cause a pregnant woman to lose her pregnancy. The Hebrew is genuinely ambiguous and translation-dependent: older English translations like the King James render the consequence as a miscarriage with “no further harm,” triggering only a fine — implying the fetus was not treated legally as equivalent to a full person, since killing an adult triggered “life for life.” Some modern translations render the same verb (yatza, to “go out” or “depart”) as the child being born prematurely but alive, changing the moral stakes of the passage considerably.[^15] This is a documented textual and translation dispute, not a matter of opinion.
Two interpretive traditions worth holding side by side:
Within Judaism, the dominant historical rabbinic reading, reflected in the Mishnah (Oholot 7:6), treats the fetus as not possessing full legal personhood (nefesh) until birth, and explicitly instructs that if a woman’s life is endangered by labor, the fetus may be sacrificed to save her, “because her life takes precedence over its life” — while also affirming that later-term abortion without cause is prohibited.[^16] Mainstream contemporary Jewish legal tradition (halakha), across Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements, generally treats abortion as permissible or required to protect the mother’s life and, in many rulings, her health, while still regarding unrestricted abortion as against Jewish values — a position that sits closer to the SBC’s 1971 language than to a strict from-conception ban.
Within conservative Protestant and Catholic tradition today, the near-universal position — developed most fully in Catholic natural law theology and adopted broadly across evangelicalism only in the years after Roe — holds that full moral personhood begins at conception, making all abortion morally equivalent to homicide, a reading its proponents ground not chiefly in Exodus 21 (whose ambiguity they generally acknowledge) but in a broader theological anthropology: passages describing God’s foreknowledge and formation of a person in the womb (Psalm 139:13, Jeremiah 1:5) read as establishing full personhood from conception, combined with post-biblical natural law reasoning about the humanity of the unborn.[^17]
Where these traditions diverge, and why: differing weight given to translation choices in Exodus, differing views on whether personhood is established gradually or instantly, and differing roles for post-biblical doctrinal development (central to Catholic theology, much less central to the sola scriptura commitments of many Protestant traditions, which creates its own internal tension when Protestant conclusions on this issue rely heavily on later doctrinal reasoning rather than a single unambiguous verse). None of this is a ruling on which tradition is theologically correct — that’s not something textual and historical analysis can adjudicate, and readers within each tradition may reasonably defer to their own interpretive authority (a rabbinic legal tradition, a Magisterium, a denomination’s confession) over an outside comparative summary like this one.
The “other killing” objection, and why it isn’t automatically a gotcha
A common frustration, including the one embedded in the question behind this piece, is that some anti-abortion religious voices don’t apply comparably strong opposition to other state-sanctioned taking of life — the death penalty, wars, or in some cases child mortality driven by policy choices around healthcare and welfare. This is a real and observable inconsistency in some individuals and political coalitions, and it is fair to name it.
It’s also fair, though, to note that this inconsistency isn’t universal, and treating it as though it disqualifies religious opposition to abortion as a category is its own kind of overreach. Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life” — sometimes called the “seamless garment” — explicitly argued in the 1980s that Catholic moral teaching should oppose abortion, the death penalty, and unjust war together, as a single coherent framework, precisely to answer this objection from within the tradition.[^18] Organizations like the Consistent Life Network today explicitly organize around exactly that combined position. So the honest framing is: the inconsistency critique is a legitimate and well-evidenced observation about many individual political actors and coalitions, but a false generalization if extended to claim that no coherent, textually-grounded religious position exists that applies equally across these issues — some do, and singling out only the inconsistent version to argue against is itself a kind of straw man.
Did legal abortion actually change crime and poverty — and what happened when Dobbs reversed it?
This is where the argument leaves philosophy and religious history and becomes a question about data — and it deserves the same discipline about fact, consensus, and speculation as everything above, because a lot of confident claims get made on both sides here that the underlying research doesn’t actually support.
Analysis of Competing Hypotheses: did Roe reduce crime? In 2001, economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt published a hypothesis, later popularized in Freakonomics, that legal abortion after 1973 accounted for as much as half of the sharp U.S. crime decline of the 1990s — their mechanism being that women disproportionately used newly legal abortion in circumstances associated with higher-risk outcomes for children, shrinking the cohort that later reached peak crime-committing age.[^23] The hypothesis is genuinely contested, not settled economics. Critics, including economist Ted Joyce, argued the correlation didn’t survive tighter methodological controls, and in 2005 two other economists (Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz) found a coding error in the original analysis; Donohue and Levitt corrected it and maintained their results held.[^24] Separately, criminologists Graham Farrell and Nick Tilley pointed out a hard problem for the U.S.-abortion-specific story: violent and property crime fell sharply across the same decades in Canada, Britain, and other developed countries that did not legalize abortion at the same time or in the same way — meaning at minimum, whatever caused the broader Western crime decline, it wasn’t only abortion access.[^25] A serious rival hypothesis exists entirely outside this debate: environmental researchers, most prominently Rick Nevin, have argued that the phase-out of leaded gasoline beginning in the 1970s — removing a neurotoxin linked to impulsivity and lowered impulse control — tracks the crime decline in multiple countries even more precisely than abortion legalization does, offering a competing explanation that doesn’t depend on reproductive policy at all.[^26] The honest tiering: it’s established fact that U.S. abortion became legal nationally in 1973 and that crime fell substantially roughly two decades later; it is not expert consensus that abortion access caused that decline — serious economists and criminologists remain split, and multiple non-abortion explanations (lead exposure, incarceration rates, policing changes) are still live in the literature. Treating “abortion cut crime” as a settled finding overstates what twenty-five years of contentious economics research has actually established.
What happens, materially, to women denied a wanted abortion? This is better established. The UCSF-led Turnaway Study — a decade-long, peer-reviewed longitudinal study comparing women who received a wanted abortion to those turned away because they were just past a clinic’s gestational limit — found that women denied an abortion were roughly four times more likely to be living below the federal poverty line and three times more likely to be unemployed in the following months, along with higher rates of debt, eviction, and bankruptcy documented years later using credit-panel data.[^27] A fair caveat, raised by the pro-life research group Americans United for Life in a critical read of the same study: some of these economic gaps between the two groups narrowed, and in some measures nearly disappeared, by the later years of the study period, meaning the sharpest, best-documented effect is a real and serious near-term financial shock rather than a permanent, unbridgeable gap in every case.[^28] Both things are true at once and worth holding together: being denied a wanted abortion reliably produces significant financial hardship in the following one to four years; whether that hardship remains a large gap indefinitely is less consistently supported by the same data.
What happened after Dobbs reversed Roe in 2022? Here the record is recent, genuinely still forming, and actively disputed — a good place to be honest about uncertainty rather than pretend the picture is clean.
At the national level, a 2024 study in JAMA Pediatrics using CDC data found infant mortality ran about 7 percent higher than the pre-Dobbs trend would have predicted in the months following the decision, concentrated among infants with congenital anomalies — consistent, the authors argued, with people in ban states being unable to end pregnancies affected by fatal fetal conditions.[^29] That finding was contested almost immediately: a critique published via National Review argued the national-level data doesn’t isolate what happened specifically in ban states versus non-ban states, and that infant mortality trends were not consistently elevated across the full post-Dobbs period, making a single clean national causal story harder to defend.[^30] Bioethicist Charles Camosy, writing from a pro-life perspective, pointed to separate 2023 data from the National Bureau of Economic Research and JAMA showing that births rose in states with abortion restrictions — evidence he read as showing the laws achieved their central goal (more children born) without the broad harm to women’s health that opponents predicted.[^31] A 2024 comparative time-series study in a peer-reviewed public health journal, looking directly at maternal morbidity in ban versus non-ban states, found the picture genuinely inconsistent depending on model specification — some analyses showed higher post-Dobbs morbidity increases in states without bans, a counterintuitive result the authors themselves flagged as sensitive to how states and dates were classified.[^32] This is a live area of contested, still-developing research, not a closed case in either direction.
The clearest, most granular evidence so far is state-specific, not national. In early 2025, an investigative analysis by ProPublica, built from seven years of purchased Texas hospital discharge records rather than survey or estimate data, found that sepsis rates among women hospitalized for a second-trimester pregnancy loss rose more than 50 percent after Texas’s abortion ban took effect in 2021, and that Texas saw dozens more in-hospital deaths of pregnant and postpartum women in 2022–23 than in a comparable pre-pandemic period, even as the national maternal mortality rate was falling.[^33] More than a dozen maternal health specialists who reviewed the findings said delayed care — waiting for a fetal heartbeat to stop before treating a miscarriage, out of fear the earlier intervention would be classified as an illegal abortion — was the most plausible explanation.[^34] It is worth noting plainly, in fairness to open questions: Texas’s own state maternal mortality review committee had, as of that reporting, not yet completed a review of 2022–23 death data, meaning even Texas’s own state health apparatus has not finished authoritatively adjudicating the cause.[^35]
Fact, consensus, speculation — held apart, one more time: It is established fact, from primary hospital billing records, that second-trimester sepsis hospitalizations rose sharply in Texas after its ban. It is reasonable expert interpretation, shared by numerous maternal-health researchers who reviewed that data, that delayed care under the new legal risk is the most plausible driver. It is contested and still-developing whether a comparable, consistent national effect on infant and maternal mortality can be shown across all ban states using national datasets — serious researchers on both sides of the abortion debate currently read the national-level numbers differently, and even Texas’s own death-review process, the mechanism that exists specifically to answer this question, has not yet finished its work.
An indicator to watch, not a conclusion to assume: Whether other ban states show a Texas-like rise in pregnancy-loss sepsis in their own hospital data, once similarly granular analyses are done, is a genuine, falsifiable, near-term indicator — it would meaningfully strengthen the case either way, and its absence would be real evidence against generalizing the Texas finding nationally.
What this looks like from outside the United States
For readers anywhere else in the world, it’s worth being explicit that the U.S. abortion fight is not a global norm right now — it’s a genuine outlier against a fifty-year global pattern.
The World Health Organization estimates roughly 73 million abortions occur worldwide each year, and researchers tracking global law changes since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development have documented an “overwhelming” trend toward liberalization across nearly every region — over 800 million more women of reproductive age now live under expanded legal grounds for abortion than three decades ago, with Africa seeing the largest number of countries lifting outright bans.[^36] The pattern isn’t just legal — it’s measurable in outcomes: between the early 1990s and late 2010s, abortion rates fell about 43 percent in countries where abortion is broadly legal, while rising roughly 12 percent in countries with the strictest legal restrictions, consistent with the well-documented public-health finding that restriction doesn’t reliably reduce the number of abortions so much as push a share of them underground, into less safe circumstances.[^37]
Only a small handful of countries have moved the other direction in the past three decades — commonly cited alongside the United States are El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland.[^38] That’s a genuinely global-scale contrast worth sitting with: Ireland, a country whose national identity and constitution were shaped for generations by Catholic doctrine, repealed its constitutional abortion ban by public referendum in 2018; meanwhile Latin America has seen what regional advocates call a “Green Wave,” with Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico’s federal system all expanding legal abortion access since 2020, even as those countries remain heavily Catholic.[^39] The consistent theme, relevant to this piece’s opening argument: religious majority status in a country does not reliably predict its abortion law — Ireland and much of Catholic Latin America moved toward access in the same years the U.S. moved away from it, which is difficult to square with the idea that a single, obvious religious reading of the underlying moral question is what’s actually driving political outcomes anywhere, including here.
International human rights bodies have increasingly framed reproductive access explicitly as a human rights matter — grounded in the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and reaffirmed at the 1994 Cairo population conference — a framing the Holy See, which holds permanent observer status at the UN, has consistently and publicly contested on the same religious-natural-law grounds discussed earlier in this piece.[^40] That’s a live, documented disagreement at the level of international law and diplomacy, not just domestic U.S. politics, and it’s the same underlying dispute this whole piece has been walking through: whether law should be grounded in a particular tradition’s account of when personhood begins, or in frameworks — bodily autonomy, harm reduction, public health outcomes — that don’t require agreement on that theological question to be actionable.## What happens when a country prohibits something people already do?
This is where a genuinely useful historical-parallel exercise comes in — not to score points, but because the United States has run this experiment before, more than once, and the results are documented well enough to reason from carefully, including where the comparison breaks down.
Alcohol, 1920–1933. Prohibition banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol nationally under the 18th Amendment. It did not stop Americans from drinking; it moved the supply underground, into the hands of organized crime, and it made the product itself more dangerous. When bootleggers began redistilling stolen industrial alcohol — legal, and exempt from tax specifically because it was supposed to be undrinkable — the federal government responded, starting in 1926, by ordering manufacturers to add increasingly lethal poisons (including methanol, kerosene, and mercury salts) to the industrial supply, in an explicit attempt to deter drinking through the threat of death or blindness.[^41] By the time Prohibition was repealed in December 1933, an estimated 10,000 Americans had died from drinking poisoned alcohol — a policy so contested at the time that New York’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, publicly called it “our noble experiment — in extermination.”[^42] Wealthier drinkers, who could afford imported liquor or private chemists to test their supply, were shielded from much of this risk; poorer drinkers, buying whatever was available, absorbed most of the deaths.[^43] The policy ended not because of a single court ruling but because the visible human cost, combined with the tax revenue lost and the empowerment of organized crime, became politically unsustainable — Congress and the states repealed it through the same constitutional-amendment mechanism that had created it, a clean, single, national reversal.
Drugs, 1971 to today — and Portugal’s different path. The United States has pursued a punitive prohibition model against most recreational drugs since the Nixon administration declared a “war on drugs” in 1971 — a policy associated, over five decades, with mass incarceration and well-documented, persistent racial disparities in enforcement (Black Americans have been arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses at multiples of the rate of white Americans despite comparable rates of drug use across groups, a finding replicated across decades of Department of Justice and Bureau of Justice Statistics data). Portugal ran a different experiment: facing a severe heroin and HIV crisis, it decriminalized personal possession of all drugs in 2001, redirecting enforcement resources toward treatment. In the following decade, Portugal’s overdose deaths and HIV infections among people who use drugs both fell dramatically — HIV diagnoses among drug users dropped from 52 percent of new cases nationally in 2000 to 6 percent by 2015, and overdose deaths fell by roughly 80 percent from their prior peak.[^44] That’s real and well-documented — and it’s not the whole, tidy story some advocates present. More recent Portuguese data complicate the picture: reported illicit drug use has risen since the early 2010s, overdose deaths have climbed again from their low point (though they remain below pre-2001 levels), and researchers disagree sharply about how much of that recent uptick reflects the original policy weakening from underfunding versus decriminalization itself losing effectiveness over two decades.[^45] The honest read: decriminalization paired with well-funded treatment produced a large, real, measurable public-health benefit in its first fifteen years; whether that benefit is durable without sustained investment is a genuinely open, contested question today, not a settled success story.
Where the mechanism repeats, in miniature, inside the abortion debate itself. Before Roe, the same two-tiered pattern shows up. It’s worth being precise about the numbers here rather than repeating an inflated figure: CDC-recorded deaths from illegal abortion had already fallen sharply for decades before 1973 — from over 1,000 a year in the early 1940s (before antibiotics made infection treatable) to just 39 recorded deaths in 1972, the year before legalization — meaning the widely repeated claim that “thousands” of American women died from illegal abortion each year immediately pre-Roe overstates the official record, and serious researchers on both sides of the debate now generally avoid that older figure.[^46] What the CDC’s own 1972–74 data does show clearly is the same access-inequality pattern seen in Prohibition-era drinking: the mortality rate from illegal abortion for nonwhite women was twelve times that of white women, driven by the same underlying mechanism as bootleg liquor — women with money and connections could access a private physician willing to perform the procedure quietly (a 1967 Harvard Crimson report estimated roughly 70 percent of illegal abortions nationally were performed by licensed doctors), while poorer and minority women were far more likely to rely on unlicensed, unsafe providers or self-induced methods.[^47] Whatever one’s view of the underlying moral question, this specific empirical pattern — legal prohibition of a widely practiced activity doesn’t eliminate it, but does reliably distribute its risks unevenly by wealth and race — repeats consistently enough across Prohibition, drug policy, and pre-Roe abortion access that it’s a genuine structural finding, not a coincidence tied to any one issue.
A rights-trajectory parallel, and a real disanalogy worth taking seriously. Separately from the public-health pattern, there’s a constitutional one. Within living memory, the Supreme Court has moved in the opposite direction from Dobbs on questions of intimate, personal conduct that states once criminalized on grounds their defenders frequently described in explicitly religious or natural-law terms: Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down state bans on interracial marriage; Lawrence v. Texas (2003) struck down remaining state sodomy laws criminalizing private consensual sex; Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. All three followed, rather than led, a decades-long shift in how the country actually behaved — meaning the pattern of “law criminalizes a private behavior most people continue anyway, and the law is eventually the thing that changes” isn’t unique to alcohol or drugs. Dobbs is the first major instance in decades of the Court moving the opposite direction on a recognized personal-liberty right, and this is exactly why Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion explicitly called for the Court to “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell“ — naming contraception access, private sexual conduct, and same-sex marriage specifically.[^48] It’s important to be precise here, because this is genuinely disputed within the Dobbs opinion itself, not just among outside commentators: Justice Alito’s majority opinion explicitly rejected that reading, stating that abortion is different from those other rights because it “uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed ‘potential life,’” and that nothing in the ruling “should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”[^49] That disanalogy — a second, morally relevant party with a competing claim to life, which has no equivalent in marriage or private sexual conduct cases — is the actual center of gravity in the abortion debate, and it’s the reason this parallel, like every parallel in this piece, only partly holds. The prohibition-and-enforcement-inequality pattern above applies regardless of which side of that core disagreement someone is on; the rights-trajectory parallel applies only if one thinks the interests at stake are structurally comparable, which is precisely the question in dispute.
What-If / Alternative Futures: two plausible trajectories from here. Sketching genuine alternatives, rather than assuming the current moment is a fixed endpoint, is a useful discipline for a subject this unsettled.
Trajectory one, modeled on Prohibition’s arc: documented, granular costs — the kind of hospital-record evidence ProPublica produced in Texas — accumulate publicly enough, state by state, that political pressure builds toward federal legislative or judicial reconsideration, the way bootleg poisoning deaths and lost tax revenue eventually made Prohibition untenable. For this to unfold, several things would have to hold: continued state-level data transparency (not guaranteed — Texas’s own maternal mortality review committee has not yet completed review of its 2022–23 death data); electoral results in swing states continuing to punish the most restrictive laws, a pattern already visible in multiple state abortion-related ballot measures since 2022; and a future Court or Congress willing to revisit Dobbs itself, which has no obvious near-term mechanism given the current composition of both bodies.
Trajectory two, modeled on the small group of holdout nations: the United States settles into durable, unresolved regional divergence rather than a single national reversal — more like Poland (which tightened restrictions in 2020 before a partial 2024–25 loosening under a new government) than like Prohibition’s clean up-or-down repeal. This is arguably the more mechanically likely path in the near term, precisely because Dobbs didn’t create one national policy to repeal — it returned the question to fifty separate state governments, with no single lever to reverse it the way the 21st Amendment reversed the 18th. For this trajectory to hold, state-level bans would need to remain enforceable despite the same access-inequality dynamics seen in Prohibition and pre-Roe abortion access — including the documented rise of interstate travel for care and mail-order abortion medication, which already shows some of the same underground-workaround pattern that undercut alcohol and drug prohibition, just via telemedicine and the postal system instead of stills and needle exchanges.
Neither trajectory is a prediction; both are genuinely live, and which one the country is actually on will likely only be clear in retrospect — the same way it took over a decade to know Prohibition’s “noble experiment” language would end up read as bitter irony rather than sincere policy description.
What the Founders actually wrote — and where they disagreed with each other
Because this argument keeps landing in American law and politics, it’s worth checking it against the documented record of the founding generation, without inventing dialogue they never wrote.
Thomas Jefferson, in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, described the First Amendment as building “a wall of separation between church and State,” arguing that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God” and that government’s reach extends to actions, not opinions or belief.[^19] James Madison made a related, sharper argument two decades earlier in his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, opposing a Virginia bill to fund Christian teachers with tax money — arguing that civil society’s laws should not be grounded in the presumed truth of any one religion’s claims, because doing so both corrupts religion and threatens liberty of conscience.[^20]
But the founding generation was not unanimous, and flattening them into one voice distorts the record. John Adams, writing in 1798 to the officers of the Massachusetts Militia, argued the opposite emphasis: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[^21] Adams wasn’t arguing for religious establishment — he supported the First Amendment — but he was making a claim Jefferson and Madison did not stress as heavily: that the republic’s practical functioning depended on a citizenry formed by religious moral habits, even while its laws remained formally neutral among religions.
Building the bridge, clearly marked as inference rather than their voice: Madison’s argument in the Memorial and Remonstrance suggests he would likely object to laws justified explicitly and solely on a specific religion’s scriptural authority, as opposed to laws that happen to align with religious views but are publicly justified on grounds — like harm, rights, or evidence — accessible to citizens regardless of faith. Adams’s letter suggests he would counter that a purely secular public square, stripped of religiously formed moral seriousness, might not sustain the self-restraint self-government requires. Both points can be true at once, and the American abortion debate — where religious conviction, public reasoning, and law all tangle together — sits exactly in the gap between them.
The limit of this whole exercise: the Founders were writing for an eighteenth-century agrarian republic of about four million people, without modern medicine, mass media, or the demographic and legal complexity of the current debate, and their political compromises coexisted with chattel slavery. Citing them settles what the constitutional structure was designed to permit and protect; it does not settle the separate moral question of when personhood begins, which none of them addressed as a matter of constitutional design.
The fallacies worth naming — used honestly, in both directions
A few recurring moves are worth naming explicitly, because naming a fallacy accurately is more persuasive than gesturing at “logic” in general:
The genetic fallacy, when a moral claim is dismissed (or accepted) purely based on who holds it or where it originated, rather than the argument’s actual content — this cuts against dismissing a bioethical argument just because a nonbeliever made it, and against dismissing one just because a believer made it.
The “no true Scotsman” move, when someone redefines “real” religion or “real” morality on the fly to exclude an inconvenient counterexample (e.g., “no true Christian would have supported segregation academies,” when historically, many devout, sincere Christians did).
Appeal to tradition, treating “this is what we’ve always believed” as settled proof, when — as the ensoulment history above shows — traditions themselves have changed.
The moving-goalpost version of the borrowing objection: allowing secular thinkers to use reason and evidence, but retroactively declaring any philosopher who ever gestured at metaphysics (like Aristotle) off-limits, is a rule that, applied consistently, would also disqualify most Enlightenment political philosophy that religious conservatives otherwise rely on (Locke, for instance, grounded natural rights partly in theological premises about God-given reason — a point cited approvingly across the political spectrum).
Hasty generalization, taking documented inconsistency in some religious anti-abortion advocates (on the death penalty, war, or welfare policy) and treating it as proof that no coherent, consistent religious position exists.
What follows, if this trend holds
Two plausible ripple effects of the underlying dispute itself: continued public confusion between “ethics” and “morals” likely keeps fueling bad-faith debate online, where the two terms get treated as interchangeable and arguments talk past each other (likely, based on the current pattern of discourse). Separately, growing public awareness of the segregation-academy history — accelerated by Balmer’s books and post-Dobbs retrospectives — is possibly reshaping how some younger evangelicals understand their own movement’s history, though this is not yet strongly evidenced at scale.
Two plausible effects of the proposed corrective (definitions-first, primary-source-grounded public conversation): it could reduce the temperature of the “can atheists be moral” argument by relocating it to the genuinely unresolved Euthyphro-style philosophical question it actually is (plausible but not yet evidenced broadly). It could also, less happily, get flattened back into tribal shorthand by partisans on both sides regardless of the nuance offered (a realistic risk given how contested history like the Balmer thesis has already been used as ammunition rather than analysis in most of its public life).
On the policy question itself, two further effects are worth naming with the same discipline. It is well-documented that women denied a wanted abortion face significant financial hardship in the near term, and reasonably well-supported at the state level — through primary hospital data in Texas — that abortion bans are associated with delayed emergency care and higher rates of a specific, serious complication (sepsis) during pregnancy loss. It is possible but not yet consistently evidenced nationally that U.S. infant and maternal mortality are rising at scale because of Dobbs specifically, given real methodological disagreement between the studies above; expect this picture to sharpen, not necessarily in one direction, as more states publish granular hospital-level data the way Texas’s reporters did. Globally, the U.S.’s post-Dobbs reversal will likely continue to be cited by international human-rights bodies and reproductive-rights organizations as a stark outlier against a near-universal liberalizing trend (already happening, and likely to continue); whether that international attention meaningfully shapes U.S. domestic policy is far more speculative — nothing in the current record suggests international pressure has historically moved U.S. abortion law in either direction.
Efforts already underway
A few real, ongoing efforts worth knowing about:
The Consistent Life Network — a real coalition applying a single ethical framework across abortion, the death penalty, war, and euthanasia, explicitly trying to model the coherence critics say is missing.
Interfaith and secular dialogue organizations, such as the Interfaith Youth Core (now Interfaith America) and the American Humanist Association, which run structured programming specifically aimed at getting religious and secular ethical frameworks talking to each other rather than past each other.
Academic bioethics centers (e.g., the Hastings Center) that publish rigorously sourced, multi-tradition analysis of exactly these contested beginning-of-life questions, explicitly presenting Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, and secular philosophical positions side by side rather than picking one as default.
Historical scholarship itself — Balmer’s work, and the critical responses to it — functioning, imperfectly but really, as the self-correcting mechanism serious history is supposed to provide, with both sides publishing, citing primary sources, and revising claims under scrutiny.
Philosophy education efforts (university intro-ethics courses, public philosophy podcasts, and secular and religious seminaries alike increasingly teaching comparative ethics) that directly address the ethics/morals conflation this piece opened with.
State-level maternal mortality review committees, where they function transparently, remain the real, existing mechanism designed to determine — with primary medical data, not political argument — whether specific deaths were preventable and why; ProPublica’s Texas reporting exists in large part because that state’s committee had not yet completed its own review, which is itself a fixable transparency and resourcing problem, not an unsolvable one.
International monitoring bodies (the WHO’s Safe Abortion guidance, the Guttmacher Institute, and the Center for Reproductive Rights’ annual World’s Abortion Laws map) that track outcomes across the roughly 199 countries and territories with different legal regimes, giving researchers and the public a real comparative baseline instead of relying on any single country’s contested domestic data alone.
Something to actually do
Next time this argument comes up — in a comment section, at a dinner table — try naming the specific claim before responding to it: is the person making the moral argument for God (a real philosophical position, worth a real answer), or are they making the false claim that no coherent nonreligious ethical tradition exists (which is empirically false and worth correcting with actual named traditions, not just assertion)? Naming the actual claim, instead of the vibe of the claim, is most of what good-faith argument requires.
The close
Criswell, the same pastor who once said a fetus wasn’t yet a person separate from its mother, spent the rest of the 1970s changing his mind — and by the time of the “Conservative Resurgence” that reshaped the Southern Baptist Convention beginning in 1979, he had become a committed pro-life advocate.[^22] People, and even entire denominations, are allowed to change their minds through argument and reflection — that’s not evidence of bad faith on its own. What’s not defensible, on any side, is pretending the change was never a change at all — that today’s position was always the obvious, sole, and inevitable reading of a fixed text, when the documented record shows real people, arguing in real time, moving.
Three-Minute Summary
“Ethics” is the discipline that studies right and wrong; “morals” are what someone actually believes. You don’t need religion to do either — Aristotle’s virtue ethics, Confucian ethics, and modern secular philosophy all build coherent moral systems without a commanding deity, and Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” isn’t the God of Abrahamic religion. The real, serious version of the religious argument (the “moral argument for God”) is a genuine unresolved philosophical debate — the Euthyphro dilemma has challenged it for over two thousand years. On abortion specifically: the Southern Baptist Convention passed pro-choice-leaning resolutions in 1971 and 1974, and a prominent SBC pastor initially welcomed Roe v. Wade in 1973. Historian Randall Balmer argues the religious right’s real founding catalyst was defending segregated Christian schools’ tax exemptions, not abortion — a serious, evidence-based thesis, but a contested one, not settled consensus. Ancient texts on abortion (like Exodus 21:22) are genuinely translation-ambiguous, and Jewish and Christian traditions have historically read them differently. Inconsistency on other forms of killing is real in some religious anti-abortion advocates, but not universal — coherent, consistent frameworks (like Cardinal Bernardin’s “consistent ethic of life”) exist too. On outcomes: the claim that legal abortion cut 1990s crime is genuinely disputed among economists (a rival explanation, leaded-gasoline exposure, is at least as well supported); denying women wanted abortions reliably causes serious near-term financial hardship; and post-Dobbs, Texas hospital data shows a real, sharp rise in pregnancy-loss sepsis tied to delayed care, while national infant-mortality data is genuinely contested between researchers. Globally, the U.S. is now a rare outlier moving toward restriction against a fifty-year worldwide trend toward liberalization — one that spans Catholic-majority countries like Ireland and much of Latin America, undercutting the idea that religious majority status predicts abortion law. History offers a useful, imperfect parallel: alcohol Prohibition (1920–33) didn’t stop drinking, it drove it underground and made it deadlier (the government’s own poisoning of industrial alcohol killed an estimated 10,000 people) until the costs became politically unsustainable; Portugal’s 2001 drug decriminalization cut overdose deaths and HIV dramatically, though recent years show that gain isn’t automatically permanent; and pre-Roe illegal abortion mortality data (much lower than the often-cited “thousands,” but twelve times higher for nonwhite women than white women) shows the same wealth-and-race-based access-inequality pattern. Separately, the Supreme Court has previously moved the opposite direction from Dobbs on intimate personal conduct (Loving, Lawrence, Obergefell) — though the majority opinion explicitly says abortion is different because a second party’s claim to “potential life” is involved, a real disanalogy at the center of the whole debate.
Something You Can Do Today
Before your next argument about religion and morality, write down the specific claim being made — “morality requires God” versus “no nonreligious ethical tradition exists” are different claims requiring different answers.
Something You Can Share
“You don’t need religion to have ethics — and you don’t get to dismiss two thousand years of philosophy asking the same hard question you just asked.”
Sources & Further Reading
Balmer, Randall. Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. Eerdmans, 2021.
“Racism, not abortion, birthed the religious right, scholar asserts,” Religion News Service / Baptist Standard, 2021: https://baptiststandard.com/news/faith-culture/racism-not-abortion-birthed-the-religious-right-scholar-asserts/
“Fact-Checking Randall Balmer’s Urban Legend on the Real Origin of the Religious Right,” The Gospel Coalition, 2022: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/evangelical-history/fact-checking-randall-balmers-urban-legend-on-the-real-origin-of-the-religious-right/
“How Southern Baptists became pro-life,” Baptist Press: https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/how-southern-baptists-became-pro-life/
Southern Baptist Convention, “Resolution On Abortion,” 1971, full text: https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/baptist/sbcabres.html
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, 1802: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-the-danbury-baptist-association/
James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 1785 (National Archives, Founders Online)
John Adams, letter to officers of the Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798 (National Archives, Founders Online)
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics (Book Λ, on the unmoved mover)
Plato, Euthyphro
de Waal, Frans. The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. W. W. Norton, 2013.
Mishnah, Oholot 7:6 (on fetal personhood and maternal life in Jewish law)
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, addresses on the “consistent ethic of life,” 1983–1984
The Consistent Life Network: https://consistentlife.org
The Hastings Center, bioethics resources: https://www.thehastingscenter.org
Donohue, J. & Levitt, S., “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” and later replies to critics, summarized at Freakonomics.com: https://freakonomics.com/2005/05/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/
Foster, D.G. et al., “Socioeconomic Outcomes of Women Who Receive and Women Who Are Denied Wanted Abortions in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health, 2018: https://www.ansirh.org/research/research/socioeconomic-outcomes-women-who-receive-and-women-who-are-denied-wanted
“The Overlooked Findings of the Turnaway Study,” Americans United for Life, 2024: https://aul.org/2024/02/01/the-overlooked-findings-of-the-turnaway-study/
Gallo, M. & Singh, P., infant mortality post-Dobbs study coverage, Ohio State University, 2024: https://news.osu.edu/us-infant-mortality-increased-7-in-months-following-dobbs/
“Mainstream media mislead on alleged increase in post-Dobbs infant mortality rate,” Live Action / National Review, 2025: https://www.liveaction.org/news/media-mislead-post-dobbs-infant-mortality
Camosy, C., “Three Takeaways from Our Post-Dobbs Moment,” First Things, 2025: https://firstthings.com/three-takeaways-from-our-post-dobbs-moment/
ProPublica, “Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared,” 2025: https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-abortion-ban-sepsis-maternal-mortality-analysis
Council on Foreign Relations, “Abortion Law: Global Comparisons,” 2024: https://www.cfr.org/articles/abortion-law-global-comparisons
Center for Reproductive Rights, “World’s Abortion Laws” map: https://reproductiverights.org/maps/world-abortion-laws/
“The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition,” Slate, 2010: https://slate.com/technology/2010/02/the-little-told-story-of-how-the-u-s-government-poisoned-alcohol-during-prohibition.html
Drug Policy Alliance, “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Learning from a Health and Human-Centered Approach”: https://drugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/dpa-drug-decriminalization-portugal-health-human-centered-approach_0.pdf
“Is Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization a Failure or Success? The Answer Isn’t So Simple,” Knowledge at Wharton, 2023: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/
Guttmacher Institute, “Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?,” 2003: https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2003/03/lessons-roe-will-past-be-prologue
“How many women really died from illegal abortion prior to Roe v. Wade?,” Live Action, 2025 (a pro-life source cited here specifically for its citation of official CDC figures): https://www.liveaction.org/news/women-died-illegal-abortion-roe
Thomas, C., concurring opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022; Alito, S., majority opinion, same case, summarized in The Hill, “Thomas calls for overturning precedents on contraceptives, LGBTQ rights,” 2022: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3535841-thomas-calls-for-overturning-precedents-on-contraceptives-lgbtq-rights/
[^1]: Baptist Press, “How Southern Baptists became pro-life,” 2020. [^2]: Southern Baptist Convention, “Resolution On Abortion,” 1971; reaffirmation, 1974, SBC.net resolution archive. [^3]: Blind Scholar, “Abortion, the Bible, and Us: The Evangelical About-Face on Abortion,” 2022, citing contemporary pastor surveys. [^4]: Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Λ. [^5]: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books I–II. [^6]: See generally Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958); Foot, Virtues and Vices (1978); MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981). [^7]: Craig, W. L., various formulations of the moral argument, e.g. in debates and Reasonable Faith (2008). [^8]: Plato, Euthyphro, 10a. [^9]: Confucius, Analects, esp. Book IV on ren. [^10]: de Waal, F., The Bonobo and the Atheist (2013); see also Primates and Philosophers (2006). [^11]: Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, drawing on Aristotelian embryology as understood at the time. [^12]: Pope Pius IX, Apostolicae Sedis, 1869. [^13]: Balmer, R., Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (2021); Religion News Service interview, Sept. 2021. [^14]: The Gospel Coalition, “Fact-Checking Randall Balmer’s Urban Legend on the Real Origin of the Religious Right,” 2022; Catholic League response, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” 2021. [^15]: Exodus 21:22–25, compared across KJV, NRSV, and NIV translations; on the yatza translation dispute, see standard critical commentaries on Exodus. [^16]: Mishnah, Oholot 7:6. [^17]: Psalm 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5; and post-biblical Catholic natural law reasoning, e.g. Donum Vitae (1987). [^18]: Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, Gannon Lecture, Fordham University, 1983, introducing the “consistent ethic of life.” [^19]: Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Jan. 1, 1802. [^20]: James Madison, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 1785. [^21]: John Adams, letter to the officers of the First Brigade, Third Division of the Massachusetts Militia, Oct. 11, 1798. [^22]: Baptist Press, “How Southern Baptists became pro-life,” 2020; Good Faith Media, “Was the Southern Baptist Convention Ever ‘Pro-Choice’?,” 2022. [^23]: Donohue, J. & Levitt, S., “The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001. [^24]: Foote, C. & Goetz, C., correction identified 2005; Donohue & Levitt reply, summarized in Freakonomics.com, “Abortion and Crime: Who Should You Believe?,” 2005. [^25]: Farrell, G. & Tilley, N., cited in “Abortion crime controversy update,” Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog, 2024. [^26]: Nevin, R., “How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy,” Environmental Research, 2000; the hypothesis is itself contested and offered here as a genuine rival explanation, not an established replacement. [^27]: Foster, D.G. et al., “Socioeconomic Outcomes of Women Who Receive and Women Who Are Denied Wanted Abortions in the United States,” American Journal of Public Health, 2018; Miller, S. et al., “The Economic Consequences of Being Denied an Abortion,” NBER Working Paper 26662, 2020. [^28]: “The Overlooked Findings of the Turnaway Study,” Americans United for Life, 2024. [^29]: Gallo, M. & Singh, P., JAMA Pediatrics, Oct. 2024, covered by Ohio State University News and CNN, Oct. 21, 2024. [^30]: “Mainstream media mislead on alleged increase in post-Dobbs infant mortality rate,” Live Action / National Review, 2025. [^31]: Camosy, C., “Three Takeaways from Our Post-Dobbs Moment,” First Things, April 8, 2025, citing NBER and JAMA 2023 data. [^32]: “Changes in maternal morbidity and infant outcomes following state-level abortion bans post-Dobbs: a comparative interrupted time series study,” PMC, 2024. [^33]: ProPublica, “Texas Banned Abortion. Then Sepsis Rates Soared,” Feb. 2025, based on Texas hospital discharge data, 2017–2023. [^34]: Ibid., citing Dr. Lorie Harper and other reviewing maternal-fetal medicine specialists. [^35]: ProPublica, “Texas Maternal Mortality Analysis: Methodology,” 2025. [^36]: World Health Organization abortion estimates, cited in Council on Foreign Relations, “Abortion Law: Global Comparisons,” March 2024; global law-change tracking from “Global progress in abortion law reform,” Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, 2025. [^37]: Council on Foreign Relations, “Abortion Law: Global Comparisons,” March 2024, citing WHO abortion-rate data by legal regime, 1990–94 to 2015–19. [^38]: Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Northwestern University, “Abortion Access Today: Global Insights and Comparisons,” 2024–25 symposium summary. [^39]: Center for Reproductive Rights, “World’s Abortion Laws” map and regional summaries, accessed 2026; Context by Thomson Reuters Foundation, “Abortion in 2024: Where are the global hotspots?,” Dec. 2023. [^40]: UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 1979; International Conference on Population and Development Programme of Action, Cairo, 1994; Holy See’s documented reservations and interventions at UN population conferences are a matter of public UN record. [^41]: “Consequences of Prohibition,” and “The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition,” Slate, 2010. [^42]: Ibid.; National Geographic, “Americans knew their booze was poisoned—and drank it anyway,” 2025. [^43]: Atlas Obscura, “The Chemist’s War of Prohibition,” on private club chemists testing patrons’ liquor for poison while poorer drinkers had no such recourse. [^44]: Drug Policy Alliance, “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Learning from a Health and Human-Centered Approach,” citing Portuguese national health data. [^45]: Knowledge at Wharton, “Is Portugal’s Drug Decriminalization a Failure or Success? The Answer Isn’t So Simple,” 2023; Transform Drug Policy Foundation, “Drug Decriminalisation in Portugal: Setting the Record Straight.” [^46]: Guttmacher Institute, “Lessons from Before Roe,” 2003; CDC abortion surveillance data as compiled in EWTN, “The Big Lie: Thousands of Illegal Abortion Deaths,” presenting CDC/Bureau of Vital Statistics figures (cited here for the underlying government data, not the source’s editorial framing). [^47]: Guttmacher Institute, “Lessons from Before Roe,” 2003, citing CDC data on the twelvefold racial disparity in illegal-abortion mortality, 1972–74; Harvard Crimson, 1967, on physician-performed illegal abortions, as cited in Live Action, “How many women really died from illegal abortion prior to Roe v. Wade?,” 2025. [^48]: Thomas, C., concurring opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022). [^49]: Alito, S., majority opinion, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. ___ (2022), as quoted in Fortune, “Justice Thomas hints gay rights and contraception at risk after conservative majority overturns Roe v. Wade,” 2022.