Abortion is the culture wars’ sole constant—other moral issues come and go, but the enduring presence of the abortion debate is a testament to how culturally thorny this issue has been for half a century. I haven’t written about abortion in some time, so this piece will have a sprawling feel to it.

I want to use my Arc colleague Nicholas Grossman’s sharp essay from earlier this week as a jumping off point in at least two respects: first, to directly address the question of what necessarily follows from the view that abortion constitutes murder, and second, to push back against the socially prominent idea that what makes anti-abortion laws so bad is that they violate bodily autonomy.