The personhood of the unborn must be resolved before we can discuss the ramifications of making abortion legal or illegal.

Respected pro-life columnist Nat Hentoff is a self-described "liberal Jewish atheist." Not your stereotypical pro-lifer! The pro-life movement desperately needs religious diversity, and Hentoff gives it credibility in secular circles.

In a 1995 Atlantic Monthly article, George McKenna wrote: "Within the liberal left, from which the Democrats draw their intellectual sustenance, there is increasing dissatisfaction with the absolutist dogma of 'abortion rights.' Nat Hentoff, a columnist in the left-liberal Village Voice, wonders why those who dwell on 'rights' refuse to consider the possibility that unborn human beings may also have rights."

Another liberal Jewish atheist, Peter Singer, concedes this point. Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation, is not liked even by pro-life liberals, including some on this e-list, because he advocates not just abortion, but infanticide and euthanasia as well. Bill Samuel, raised a Quaker, a lifelong vegetarian, and is currently president of Consistent Life, once compared Peter Singer to Hitler. (There is a sad irony here, as Peter Singer lost three of his four grandparents in the Nazis' concentration camps.)

Pro-life feminist Mary Krane Derr called Peter Singer's Should the Baby Live? "intellectualized racism", because he advocates euthanizing handicapped infants. I'll always respect Peter Singer as the author of Animal Liberation (i.e., for stating in secular philosophical and to some extent political language what we ethical vegetarians have always known to be true), but disagree with him on the issues of abortion, infanticide and euthanasia.

Anyway, in his article, "Taking Life: the Embryo and the Fetus", Singer quotes a report of a British government committee inquiring into laws about homosexuality and prostitution, which concluded: "There must remain a realm of private morality and immorality that is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business." ("Not the Law's Business?" --the Wolfenden Committee-- issued the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, Command Paper 247, London, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1957, p. 24)

Singer quotes John Stuart Mill (from "On Liberty"):

"...the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others..."

Singer writes, "Mill's view is often and properly quoted in support of the repeal of laws that create 'victimless crimes'--like the laws prohibiting homosexual relations between consenting adults, the use of marijuana and other drugs, prostitution, gambling and so on. Abortion is often included in this list...

"The fallacy involved in numbering abortion among the victimless crimes should be obvious," concedes Singer. "The dispute about abortion is, largely, a dispute about whether or not abortion does have a 'victim.' " So even Peter Singer, hardly a right-to-lifer, concedes the abortion debate centers on whether or not abortion is "victimless." Nat Hentoff's observation is correct!

In Guerilla Apologetics for Life Issues (2005), Paul Nowak says, "You should try as much as possible to keep religion out of the discussion." Nowak asks his readers to try and get pro-choicers to determine when they think human rights should begin, implying since life begins at fertilization, all other criteria (viability, birth, etc.) are arbitrary.

Since life is a continuum from fertilization until death, the real question in the abortion debate is not the seemingly absurd scenario of giving full human rights to human zygotes, but rather the thorny question of how to protect those rights without violating a new mother's privacy and civil liberties.

In his 1992 book, Visions of Liberty, former Executive Director of the ACLU, Ira Glasser writes:

"The use of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping emerged during the Prohibition era. Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger whom the government wished to search. It placed taps in the basement of his office building and on wires in the streets near his home. No physical entry into his office or home took place. Olmstead was convicted entirely on the basis of evidence from the wiretaps.

"In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Olmstead argued that the taps were a search conducted without a warrant and without probable cause, and that the evidence seized against him should have been excluded because it was illegally gathered. He also argued that his Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against himself was violated.

"By a 5-4 vote, the Court rejected his arguments and upheld the government's power to wiretap without limit and without any Fourth Amendment restrictions, on the grounds that no actual physical intrusion had taken place.

"Olmstead's Fifth Amendment claim was also dismissed on the grounds that he had not been compelled to talk on the telephone, but had done so voluntarily. Thus the Court upheld the government's power to do by trickery and surreptitious means what it was not permitted to do honestly and openly. It wasn't until 1967, in a similar case involving gambling, that the Court overruled the Olmstead decision by an 8-1 margin and recognized that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping and electronic surveillance...

"From the beginning, when wiretapping was virtually invented to enforce laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol, to the late 1960s, when gambling was a major target, to the present, when the use and sale of drugs other than alcohol are the main target, these intrusive devices have been used mostly to enforce laws aimed at punishing and proscribing personal conduct...the invasion of privacy inherent in wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping remains with us as part of the legacy of our attempts to criminalize personal conduct.

"The other major use of electronic eavesdropping has been to punish political dissent. For decades, former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used wiretaps and other electronic devices to spy on political figures and citizens not yet suspected of having committed a crime. He built vast dossiers on their political activities and personal lives. Special units of local police called 'Red Squads' did the same."

The key issues in the abortion debate are thus the personhood of the unborn, and the extent of individual and marital privacy.