In this, the 31st year since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision paved the way for legal access to abortion in America, reproductive rights are under threat as never before. In the face of mounting political pressure from anti-choice activists, politicians and organizations, the number of abortion providers across the country has dropped to an all-time low, and fewer and fewer medical schools offer to teach abortion procedures to students.

The Bush administration itself is proving to be one of the biggest threats to reproductive freedom. Bush continues to advocate for funding and support for abstinence-only sex education. (No evidence has shown that abstinence-only education reduces teen-pregnancy rates or levels of sexual activity.) Additionally, if Bush is reelected, Justices Kennedy, O’Connor and Rehnquist will almost certainly retire from the Supreme Court, leaving a vacuum for Bush to fill with anti-choice, activist justices who will carry on the conservative tradition of paternalism — telling citizens what to do — in making legal judgments on abortion.

So when Bishop Raymond Burke of La Crosse recently decreed that two Catholic Wisconsin legislators who are pro-choice should not receive communion, he simply added one more voice to the fray. While Burke was within the prerogative of his office to make such a statement, it did not carry the force of law and was not an act of public policy. Yet he tapped into a pervasive belief among Americans that abortion is a moral issue, not a legal one.

It hasn’t always been that way. In the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote: “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins … the judiciary … is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.” The Roe decision was legalistic, not moralistic; the Court held that “the right of personal privacy” — derived from the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — “includes the abortion decision … ”

Today the debate over abortion is not legal but moral in tone. Clergy, activists and politicians wrangle with the ethical justifications for denying or providing women with access to abortions. Against Justice Blackmun’s advice, much of this debate has centered on resolving the “difficult question” of whether life begins at conception or at some later point. Another difficult question is that of deciding whether the termination of an embryo is justified in the name of a woman’s interests.

Of these issues, only the second merits extended consideration. This is not because the first is not a thorny question of ethics that an individual faces when considering abortion. However, it is a personal question, not one that can be decided by an act of legislation or judicial review. As Justice Blackmun so ably foresaw, we are not soon going to arrive at a consensus.

Why do we need choice? Because, in many cases, the woman’s interests — indeed, freedoms — are precisely what’s at stake. Reproductive rights form the last province of American law in which a strong strain of paternalism persists. If the government were to attempt to deny Americans the right to other medical procedures — for example, vasectomies or tubal ligations — we would quickly find that attempting to legislate away Americans’ freedom would prove impossible.

How can the government have the power to deny a woman the freedom to control her own body — to tell her that her uterus is not her own? So long as sexual inequality continues to exist in America — so long as insurance companies will pay for Viagra but not Ortho-Evra, so long as abstinence-only sex education programs that dispel inaccurate and ideologically skewed information on contraception and birth control are forced on our nation’s teens, so long as one of every eight women are victims of sexual assault or rape on college campuses such as UW-Madison — we will need to ensure that women have the last word in deciding what happens in their bodies.

Rob Hunter ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and philosophy.