A signal event in America’s long trial over the tragedy of abortion occurred this week with the publication of a cover story in New York magazine that was simply titled, “My Abortion.” As the cover advertises, the article features “twenty-six personal dispatches from a culture war without end.”

The issue is riveting, offering testimonies from women who have aborted their children—some of them repeatedly. Meaghan Winter begins the article by setting the context in 2013, forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, believing that it has settled the issue.

As Winter explains, “Of all the battles in our half-century culture war, perhaps none seems further from being resolved, in our laws and in our consciences, than abortion.”

That statement, taken on its own terms, is incredibly revealing, even as it is self-evidently true. The advocates of legal abortion are particularly perplexed and frustrated by this fact. Their confidence had been that Roe had settled the issue and that abortion on demand would become a central part of the nation’s moral consensus. But Roe did not settle the issue. Indeed, the abortion issue has been a central and unavoidable moral conflict in this nation ever since.

Read the article.