The reported leak of a working paper from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito seems to lay the ground work to tackle the precedent and possibly overturn the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The much-heralded champion of women’s rights, the late Justice Ruth B. Ginsburg, commented that she felt Roe. v. Wade was the wrong case to determine abortion rights. Justice Ginsburg opined for the case would have sustainability were the rulings incrementally taking into account state laws and if one of its rationales had been the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution focusing on gender equality rather than privacy —put the focus on a woman’s right to choose.

Supreme Court Justice to be Katangi Brown Jackson couldn’t define what is a woman and the “trans revolution” and new scientific human modifications also add a challenge this concept.  The Supreme Court’s makeup in 1973 was all male and likely didn’t support laws treating men and women differently because biological differences as in pregnancy would make equal protection somewhat moot.

Having trained with obstetrics and gynecology as a family medicine resident, too often lost in the discussion of abortions was the fate of the fetus, which is still given too little or too much consideration depending on which side you stand. The Guttmacher Institute notes that l in 4 women will have an abortion, while the CDC reports that 60% of those having abortions have one child at home.

When you’ve witnessed a woman losing four pints of blood due to pregnancy related issues, suffer from cancer while pregnant, have crazy misplaced ectopics that  were life threatening or felt your curette going through the thinned uterine lining in a pregnancy that was to be aborted, one becomes less cavalier or judgmental on the issue.  Abortions are a medical issue and should be treated in that milieu, not as a political ball of wax.

• If the courts try to play G-d in establishing when life begins using only one religion as its yardstick, this is deeply concerning and very problematic as the oldest monotheistic religion, Judaism not only allows abortion but even requires it if the health of the mother is at risk. Such a ban would possibly violate our First Amendment rights to make decisions in accordance with our faith.

• An opinion on this issue must stop the continued erosion of the fact that abortions are a medical procedure and remains such appreciating that this is not to be an on-demand procedure to be used for birth control.  People need to get out of others consensual intimate space and appreciate the Griswold v. Connecticut court decision granting people the right to use contraception particularly if a pregnancy is not desired.

• A misnomer here is the assumption that access means the government must pay for abortion procedures rather than demand that those seeking abortions for non-medical reasons should be empowered to pay for them themselves.

Legislation using pain thresholds or fetal heartbeats to determine life is very problematic and not steeped in facts.   Many fetuses over 6 months can have reasonably good survival outcomes and the 20-week limit on doing abortions showed more reasonableness than exploitation of partial birth abortion claims.

“The person forced to be pregnant against their will is wrong” line of thought is used by many in justifying a medical procedure secularized to the point of losing a sense of morality and personal responsibility for the issue. Many past U.S. presidents have lamented that abortions must be safe, legal and few.  There are some things which must also remain in the realm of individual privacy, this being one of them.

Ada M. Fisher is a physician who was a medical director in a Fortune 500 company, previous member of a county board of education, licensed secondary education teacher, author, poet, public speaker and was the N.C. Republican National Committeewoman (2012-2020).