Congrats to Greg Popcak for making the LATimes op-ed page, in response to an earlier op-ed on abortion by Garry Wills:

Wills, confident that he has torn down the crucifix, attempts to place a statue of the Goddess of Reason in its place, but even there he fails. He argues the woman needs to be given the choice to decide when and whether she is carrying a fetus or a person. So, by some amazing act of cognitive voodoo, it is the woman’s choice that decides when human personhood begins? Why then, restrict the woman’s choice to the womb? Some philosophers, like Princeton’s Peter Singer, have the courage of Wills’ convictions, extending a woman’s choice to end a life all the way through birth and infancy. Using his own argument, there is no logical reason Wills should deny a woman’s right to infanticide. After all, qualified people disagree here too. In addition to Singer, no less a personage than James Watson, Nobel Prize-winning co-discoverer of DNA, has advocated infanticide in cases of neonatal imperfection or retardation. Wills himself takes potshots at the case of Terri Schiavo, who was obviously out of the womb. Any number of people would argue that simply making it out of the chute does not qualify one to claim that he or she possesses a human life. So, who is a person and when? If we had followed Wills’ recommendation to let the mother decide, Terri Schiavo would certainly have fared better.

Which brings us back to the role of religion in the abortion debate. Wills particularly takes aim at the moral positioning of evangelicals, and he is right that because the evangelicalism of the 20th century tends to have little regard for either natural law or apostolic tradition, its moral positions are largely unmoored. But evangelicals’ spiritual and moral wisdom continues to be nourished by these ancient traditions upheld by more traditional forms of Christianity.
That said, I would actually agree with Wills that abortion is not a religious issue. As the pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff would no doubt argue, abortion is a human issue. Each time a child is killed through abortion, the bell tolls for us. And yet, history has shown us that abortion is a human issue to which only religion can competently and consistently respond. It is the job of religion to assert the dignity of even those who superficially appear to be supremely undignified. It is the job of religion to insist that each person has a right to life even when we wish it were not so. It is the job of religion to assert that “all men are created equal” — a revealed truth if ever there was one — for quite obviously they are not.
Indeed, some truths can only be revealed, and in the face of scientific disagreement on the nature and origin of personhood, only religion has the courage to go where agnostics fear to tread.