To the Journal editor:

Soon, Michigan voters will decide if women will be able to elect to undergo a medical procedure to legally and safely terminate a pregnancy as they have been able to do for nearly the last fifty years.

Access to abortion is, perhaps, the hot button issue in the upcoming midterms. I would argue that many of the same passions that fuel the pro-life/pro-choice debate also fuel much of the broader culture wars, in general. I suspect that many Americans who voted for the former president didn’t do so because of his many marriages, his alleged extramarital dalliances with pornstars, and goodness only knows what else. I think many voted for him because he claimed to be pro-life. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I suspect that they feel largely vindicated.

Setting public policy in a representative democracy must involve recognizing that different people value vastly different things. America is, by design, a diverse melting pot, a place where people from very different cultures and circumstances come together to start over. Many came to these shores and continue to come here to escape economic and political oppression.

New arrivals automatically clustered together in towns and neighborhoods, finding comfort in their shared histories and experiences. These immigrants sought out new opportunities while still relishing “the old ways.” Many of their cultures have traditionally favored males for positions of political power and economic privilege. Such practices are even enshrined in various holy books written, not surprisingly, mostly by men.

I was raised by my mother from the age of nine when my dad deserted the family. Out of necessity, my mom started up and ran two small businesses at a time when a single or divorced woman couldn’t even get credit or “be allowed” to open a bank account. The more obstacles the system placed in her path just because she was a woman, the harder she’d push back. She was, without any doubt, the toughest, most determined, and hardest working person that I’ve ever met.

Women still don’t make as much money as men for equivalent work, their ideas are still routinely dismissed in the workplace and in the public square, and now some would like to boldly reassert the old “barefoot and pregnant” narrative in the name of liberty and justice.

Anxious to see the return of the back alley abortion? I’m not.