Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that could upend Roe v. Wade.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. This is Breakpoint.

At the very least, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is the most significant challenge

to legalized abortion to date. In question, is a Mississippi law known as

the Gestational Age Act. If the court decides that the law should stand, the power to determine

and limit abortion rights would effectively be returned to the states. The long battle over

abortion in America has had many chapters. For years, most advocates of legalized abortion

argued that they were not

really pro-abortion. Abortion, they claimed, was not a good thing, but women should have the

right to decide whether or not to carry a baby to term. The painful decision to have an abortion,

continued this rhetoric, is always tragic, but a woman must retain autonomy over her own body

and health. With a preferred label for these abortion

advocates was pro-choice, but it's always been a problematic term. For starters, a pre-born baby has

distinct DNA in a separate body, so abortion involves a body other than just the mothers, and her

choice is made for someone else. The baby is not given a choice. Remarkable advances in

science and technology over the years eventually dismantled claims by early pro-choice advocates

that the preborn are not yet human. So the assertion had to shift. Preborn humans are not really

persons. This raised an immediate and historically fraught question,

who gets to decide which human beings are persons and which ones are not? What non-arbitrary criteria

could possibly be used to decide personhood, and how could such a criteria be applied

consistently in a world where one woman mourns a miscarriage and another one deliberately

causes one. Now, typically, advocates who embrace that label pro-choice would label their opponents,

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