Is abortion a religious issue?

Garry Wills, author of , says it isn't.

What makes opposition to abortion the issue it is for each of the GOP presidential candidates is the fact that it is the ultimate "wedge issue" -- it is nonnegotiable. The right-to-life people hold that it is as strong a point of religion as any can be. It is religious because the Sixth Commandment (or the Fifth by Catholic count) says, "Thou shalt not kill." For evangelical Christians, in general, abortion is murder. That is why what others think, what polls say, what looks practical does not matter for them. One must oppose murder, however much rancor or controversy may ensue.

But is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

John Jacubczyk writes a response.

The pro-abortion crowd will do anything but examine the facts. Indeed in order to confuse the average person who must focus his or her daily life on the mundane things such a taking care of the family to getting through the rush hour traffic, the pro-abortion propagandist will dig up well-worn canards in an effort to cloud the issue.

Such were the old discredited arguments propounded by Gary Wills in his November 4, 2007 piece published by the Los Angeles Times. Wills, a dissident Catholic liberal, has made a living attacking the Church of his parents. In his article he attempts to sound intellectual, all the while presenting false, misleading bits of history along with half-truths designed to give the reader both an intellectual as well as religious reason not to care about the abortion debate.