Excellent article that really highlights what I think we often forget: the anti-abortion debate in the United States is largely theological, and based on extremist, fundamentalist Christian theology.

I've just been reading in the last couple days that pro-choice advocates may start moving judicially on that notion. After all, the "ensoulment" argument against abortion is a religious belief, and banning abortion based on that would violate the first amendment rights of people with different faith beliefs or no beliefs.

I think this is one of the reasons you'll see "natural law" bandied about increasingly among right-wing Protestants for whom natural law has traditionally been considered a heresy. (It's a Roman Catholic philosophy invented in the early Middle Ages that rests on extra-Biblical ideas, violating the post-Luther Protestant insistence on "sola scriptura" as a basis for Christian belief.)

I don't know how any of these legal ideas will play out in the increasingly right-wing federal courts, especially at the Supreme Court level where several of the justices have expressed respect for "natural law," citing it as a non-religious philosophy. It is not non-religious, of course; it is fundamentally and inalterably Roman Catholic.

I don't know where we're headed as a nation with all of this, but the idea that we're a pluralistic, essentially secular state is becoming increasingly tenuous.