Roe v. Wade, Planned Parent­hood v. Casey, and the other precedents that compose the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of abortion should be overturned and consigned to the ash heap of history because they have for decades imposed on the nation, without constitutional warrant, an extreme, incoherent, and deeply unjust regime pursuant to specious reasoning and constantly changing rules, standards, and rationales. Fidelity to the Constitution, the judicial role, and the goods served by the prudential doctrine of stare decisis — stability, transparency, sustainability, and the perceived integrity of the judicial process — are sufficient reasons for the Court in the upcoming case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to reverse Roe and Casey and allow the political branches of government to enact laws and policies that care rightly for vulnerable mothers, children (born and unborn), and families.

But there is another reason to dismantle the lawless artifice of American abortion jurisprudence: namely, that it is built on a conception of human identity and flourishing that is false, dangerous, and in no way required by the Constitution. Put another way, Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and their progeny graft onto our constitution a distorted understanding of what it means to be human. These precedents dissolve the parental relationship, atomize and isolate mother and child, and recast them as strangers locked in a zero-sum vital conflict. The Court’s misframing of the human context thus led it to invent a right to use private violence suitable for repelling an intruder. In so ruling, the Court cut off mother and child from possible public and private sources of genuine aid and protection.

Consider Justice Blackmun’s discussion of the source of the right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, such as it is. He began by invoking an unwritten “right to privacy” previously discussed in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut (regarding the freedom of married couples to use contraception), which Blackmun argued was a substantive right implied by the procedural guarantee of the 14th Amendment that “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” This right to privacy, he argued, extended to the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. (Never mind that the 14th Amendment’s due-process clause was ratified in 1868, when abortion was a codified crime in 30 of 37 states and had been a common-law crime since the American founding.)

The right to abortion emerged from Justice Blackmun’s balancing of the interests of what he styled as two contending parties — the pregnant woman versus her unborn child, as represented by the state. Specifically, Blackmun weighed what he perceived as the burdens borne by a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, on the one hand, and the state’s interests in defending prenatal life and safeguarding maternal health, on the other. As for the burdens on the woman, he first noted the possibility of medical harms associated with an unwanted pregnancy. But his list of burdens quickly moved on from the physical and psychic consequences of unwanted pregnancy to the harms to women (and others) caused by unwanted parenthood following the child’s birth, including “a distressful life and future,” mental and physical health “taxed by child care,” “distress for all concerned associated with the unwanted child,” the problem of bringing an additional child into a family unable or unwilling to care for it, and the “stigma of unwed motherhood.”

Blackmun concluded that the prenatal child’s interests paled in comparison with these other concerns. The unborn child, according to Blackmun, was neither a “person” within the meaning of the 14th Amendment (entitled to due process and equal protection of the law) nor, in a narrower legal sense, entitled to the basic protections of the law from private lethal violence. In fact, Blackmun and colleagues held that because the interests of the pregnant woman were so strong, states such as Texas are forbidden by the Constitution to adopt “one theory of life” and treat the unborn as persons. The moral and legal standing of the unborn child must, according to Blackmun, remain a matter of private judgment, reposed in the woman herself. Thus, the Court in Roe functionally declared (despite its claims to remain agnostic and neutral on the question) that unborn children are not legal persons.

The right to abortion thus arises from Blackmun’s framing of the human question as a clash of interests between strangers — a person and nonperson. This narrative of conflict bears little relation to the reality of human procreation and pregnancy, in which the dramatis personae include a woman and her biological offspring literally joined in body, one inside the other and utterly dependent on the other, the two lives integrated and intertwined to a degree found in no other human relationship. They are, biologically speaking, mother and child. They are not homeowner and burglar, host and parasite, or violinist and unwilling conjoined kidney donor (to borrow a famous analogy from philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson). This is not a dispute over private property. Moreover, there is no mere “unplugging” to undo this relationship; modern methods of abortion involve the direct killing and removal of the fetus through highly invasive and violent means. Blackmun’s narrative of conflict is simplistic, foreign, and forgetful of lived embodied reality.

The plurality decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey modified the rule and rationale set forth in Roe v. Wade and articulated the framework that ostensibly governs today, namely, that prior to fetal viability the state may not “unduly burden” a woman’s right to abortion and deprive her of ultimate authority to terminate her pregnancy. After viability, the state may regulate or restrict abortion so long as it includes exceptions for cases in which an abortion is required to preserve a woman’s life or health (broadly conceived to include all aspects of her well-being, including “familial interests,” as judged by the abortion-provider himself).

Despite these differences between the two cases, the Court in Casey followed Roe in holding that the right to abortion grows out of its balancing of the goods of reproductive autonomy and self-determination, on the one hand, and the state’s interest in protecting unborn life, preserving the integrity of the medical profession, and promoting respect for life more generally, on the other. And, as in Roe, the Court in Casey makes it clear that as between these contending goods, the former interests are decisively superior.

The opinion is a paean to liberty of a very particular sort. It is the freedom of the unencumbered, atomized individual will to define and express its originality over and above outmoded social conventions and pursue a destiny of its own choosing. In the words of the opinion, the right to abortion springs from the freedom “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The right to abortion frees a woman to make choices based on “her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society” and to break away from outmoded and repressive norms regarding appropriate social roles. It is the freedom to live authentically in a way that may be transgressive of conventional mores. And the right to abortion guarantees the continuing freedom for women to “organize[] intimate relationships and [make] choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society” in the event that efforts at birth control fail. In this way, the right to abortion serves as an indispensable mechanism to allow women to pursue the same forms of sexual expression available to men, without being unequally burdened in their pursuit of charting their own destinies socially and economically.

Casey suffers from the same anthropological deficits as Roe. There is no serious discussion of the meaning of pregnancy’s singular bodily integration and intertwining of mother and child. There is no exploration of the significance of the bonds of kinship. There is no reflection on the fact that sexual intercourse is the means by which a new human life comes into being — emerging already embedded in a relationship with mother, father, and family. The Court does not consider that the womb is the locus of this event and the first place of belonging for the child. There is no wrestling with the complexity and risks of dividing the world of living human organisms into “persons” who bear rights and “nonpersons” who live at the sufferance of others, according to their interests and desires. The opinion does not grapple with the possibility that in the networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving that are required to protect and promote the flourishing of a community of embodied beings, the vulnerability and dependence of a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy constitutes a summons for aid that must be answered by those able to render it. Instead the opinion imagines a world of strife in which atomized strangers are isolated in their vulnerability, with only the “freedom” to resort to force against others to protect their interests. It is also a world without unchosen obligations that inhere in particular natural relationships.

In Roe v. Wade and Planned Parent­hood v. Casey, the Supreme Court of the United States not only prohibited the political branches of government from extending the basic protections of the law to unborn children, without any legitimate constitutional warrant or justification; it did so pursuant to a narrative about human identity and flourishing that pits mother and child against one another in a zero-sum conflict between strangers, conferring on the former the right to use lethal violence against the latter. Otherwise, the Court’s decision abandons the woman in her vulnerability and forbids the elected representatives of the people to act on the truth of the matter, which is that the human context in which the issue of abortion arises involves a mother and child in crisis, not two strangers clashing over resources. The response of any decent society when confronted with a mother and child in crisis is to rush to the aid of both, surrounding them with protection, support, and love before, during, and after the child is born.

The Supreme Court has for nearly 50 years prevented American officials and private citizens from rendering such aid and protection through its specious “right to abortion” rooted in a false, reductive, and dangerous account of what it means to be human. God willing, the justices will soon right this grievous wrong and restore to us the authority to care for mothers, children (born and unborn), and families in need.