Returning abortion policy to the states would be an excellent and necessary step in the right direction. Hundreds of thousands of lives would be saved, and that matters. But it will not be enough for Texas and Mississippi and other red states to restrict abortion if New York and California still permit the mass murder of unborn children. This might make for a good political solution, but it would be nothing more than a temporary fix, because it doesn’t get to the root of the issue.

At its very core, the abortion debate is about whether one human being gets to decide the dignity and personhood of another. That’s a question that has to be answered definitively, one way or the other. Everything else is just noise. We cannot, as a society, coexist and work together if one-half of the country legally degrades the moral worth of human beings while the other does not…

Lincoln understood that political compromise simply was not possible on questions of basic morality because those questions form the very foundation of this country, its constitutional system, and its legal order. Either a human being has innate dignity that is worth protecting or does not. There can be no ifs, buts, or maybes.