Human autonomy
Margaret Talbot, writing at the New Yorker:
None of that changes the fundamental principle of human autonomy: people have to be able to make their own decisions in matters that profoundly and intimately affect their own bodies and the course of their lives. Regret and ambivalence, the ways that one decision necessarily precludes others, are inextricable facts of life, and they are also fluid and personal. Guessing the extent to which individuals may feel such emotions, hypothetically, in the future, is not a basis for legislative bans and restrictions.
If you took this paragraph and published it even twenty years ago, everyone would nod along and say “well, of course.”
But publishing it now? In the midst of (if you follow the reasoning in the Dobbs dissent) a torching of decades of legal progress for human rights? Well, suddenly it takes on new meaning, doesn’t it?