If the Republicans succeed in turning Judge Barrett into Justice Barrett, it is probable that the U.S. Supreme Court will, within the next year, either completely reverse the Roe v. Wade decision or weaken it to the point that the states will be free to legislate whatever abortion laws they wish.

No doubt, the court’s decision will be interesting to read, but it will probably not touch upon all the factors affecting its deliberations, nor upon all the societal consequences of its decision.

Let me consider two of those matters here: first, the role of religion; second, the issue of gender equality.

If Justice Amy Coney Barrett joins a majority of the court in rejecting Roe, her fellows in that majority will probably be Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and perhaps John Roberts. Four are practicing Catholics; Gorsuch was raised Catholic and is now an Episcopalian. Barrett herself is a Catholic.

The Catholic Church did not formulate its current doctrine on abortion, viz. that the fetus is a human being from conception and that abortion is therefore murder, until 1869. Why God waited nearly 2,000 years after Christ’s birth to reveal that truth to the church is a mystery. Before 1869, the church regarded abortion as sinful, but only because it was an interference with the procreative process, like contraception. It also considered the fetus to be a human being only when it became “animated,” i.e. moved in the womb.

The church’s current doctrine has no biblical basis. Abortion is not mentioned in the Bible, nor is there any passage from which one can assuredly infer the “personhood” of the fetus. Scholars suggest that the present doctrine was formulated largely because, in 1854, the church had decided that Mary was without sin “from the moment of her conception,” which seemed to require that she was a person at that moment.

The Catholic Church has been a conspicuous enemy of Roe. Soon after that decision was handed down, the church mounted a massive effort to have it nullified. It covertly funneled millions of dollars into “pro-life” organizations — covertly, because it feared losing its tax-exempt status if it did so openly. It has encouraged, ever since, the tactic of erecting legal barriers to the availability of abortion services.

It is not permissible for a Supreme Court justice to allow personal beliefs to influence a court decision. Judge Barrett has said so herself. And, in fairness to Catholics, I must note that Justice Sotomayor is also a Catholic and is unlikely to vote to overturn Roe. It’s possible that political liberalism or conservatism is, in the final analysis, more influential than religious convictions on this issue.

Nonetheless, if Roe is reversed, it will be hard not to believe that the justices’ religious beliefs have played some role in their decision. If that is the case, the principle of the separation of church and state will have been violated. In the event of a complete rejection of Roe, the court will foist upon the entire American public a religious doctrine peculiar to Catholicism and certain fundamentalist Christian denominations. If it simply leaves abortion law up to the states, it will allow those states to impose that same religious doctrine on all their residents.

With regard to the issue of gender equality, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that one of the most shameful facets of western civilization, from the Greeks to the present, is the pervasive, unrelenting denial of full human rights to women.

We are currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. But we must not forget that it required more than a hundred years — including decades of hard, fruitless political struggle and sacrifice — before women achieved the right to vote.

Why did it take so long? Because American society has always been — though to a diminishing degree over the last 50 years — patriarchal. Men have made the laws and been the judges, men have run the businesses and acted as the priests and ministers, and men have been the heads of households. Women have been regarded as weak, inferior, ruled by emotions and justly subservient to men. Women’s roles — supposedly decreed by God — have been to assist men, as wives and homemakers, and to bear their children. The only professions outside the home for which they were thought to be suited were the “helping” ones, e.g. nursing.

In patriarchal societies, men make the important decisions; women obey them. In such societies, a woman’s autonomy is virtually nil. Even if control of a woman has not been ceremoniously transferred by her father to a husband, she faces a world in which her freedom to choose a life for herself is drastically limited.

Certainly, acquiring the right to vote in 1920 was a step in the right direction for American women, but men still ran the show then, and the achievement of full autonomy was far in the future. With respect to sexual rights, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Griswald v. Connecticut, in 1965, that the privacy rights of couples included the right to use contraceptives, that was an important step in the direction of gender equality, but it was soon eclipsed by Roe v. Wade, in 1973. In that decision, the court recognized that the constitutionally implied right to privacy also gives women a constitutional right to control their own bodies and decide to end a pregnancy, though it was, admittedly, not an unqualified right, for it weakened as the fetus reached maturity.

If, in the near future, SCOTUS completely rejects the privacy right premise of Roe, or allows states to ignore that right, it will set back the progress of gender equality for decades. It will return us to an age in which one of the most personal and consequential decision that a woman can face, is not hers to make. One is entitled to wonder, as Lincoln did, whether a nation that is “half slave and half free” can long endure.

Leonard Hitchcock of Pocatello is an alumnus of the University of Iowa and did graduate work at Claremont Graduate University and the University of California, San Diego. He taught philosophy in California and Arizona for 15 years. In 1985, after earning a library degree, he was hired by Idaho State University. He retired from ISU’s Oboler Library in 2006.