How a conversation with my friend Jacob showed me that the hardest political fight in America might actually be a vocabulary problem
Jacob is pro-life. Genuinely, sincerely, from a place of real conviction. He believes life begins at conception and that this position has scientific grounding. He’s not wrong about the biology. A fertilized egg is biologically alive from the moment of fertilization. That part isn’t actually disputed.
What is disputed is what that biological fact means legally and morally. And that question, it turns out, is not a scientific question at all. It’s a philosophical one. And philosophical questions are exactly where our political system breaks down most completely.
We were working through how Congressus would handle the abortion issue, and I expected it to be our hardest conversation. It was. But not for the reason I expected. The fight wasn’t really between Jacob’s values and mine. The fight was about something much more specific and much more solvable.
It was about a word.
What the Data Actually Shows
Before I get to the word, let me tell you what Congressus would find when it starts listening to what Americans actually believe about abortion.
Because here’s the thing that our political system has spent thirty years hiding: most Americans are not at the extremes.
Consistent polling across decades shows roughly 19 percent of Americans support abortion access without any restrictions. About 8 percent oppose it in all circumstances, no exceptions. And about 73 percent, nearly three-quarters of the country, are somewhere in the middle. They have nuanced positions. They think circumstances matter. They think there’s a difference between the first trimester and the eighth month. They think rape, incest, and serious health risks change the calculation. They wish we could find some reasonable ground and stop fighting about it.
That 73 percent has never had their actual position represented. Not once. Because the political system has no mechanism to find the middle. It only amplifies the edges.
Congressus would find this immediately. Not through polls, but through listening to millions of people talk about what they actually believe. And what would effervesce to the top, through sheer weight of genuine human sentiment, is not the absolutist positions that dominate cable news. It’s something more honest and more complicated.
Jacob’s position would be in that data. My position would be too. And so would the 73 percent who just want something that makes sense.
What Jacob Is Actually Arguing
I want to be fair to Jacob’s position because I think it deserves more serious engagement than it usually gets.
He’s not arguing from ignorance. He’s not arguing from cruelty. He’s arguing from a genuinely held philosophical conclusion: that from the moment of conception, a human life exists, and that life has moral weight that the law should protect.
The biological starting point is real. Life does begin at conception in a meaningful sense. What Jacob is really saying is that this biological reality carries moral and legal significance that cannot be dismissed simply because the entity in question is small or dependent or not yet conscious in the way adults are conscious.
That’s a serious argument. Millions of people hold it seriously. Congressus doesn’t dismiss it. What Congressus does is ask a different question entirely.
Not: when does life begin?
But: who does the law protect, and how do we define that precisely enough that we’re not fighting about definitions forever?
The Word That Changes Everything
Here’s what I said to Jacob that shifted the whole conversation.
The Constitution doesn’t protect “life.” It protects persons. The 14th Amendment protects citizens. And citizenship, unlike personhood or life, has a definition. A clear, unambiguous, legally precise definition that has been settled since 1868: citizenship begins at birth on US soil or birth to citizen parents.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Not a philosophical position. Not a theological conclusion. A legal definition that everyone who accepts the Constitution already accepts.
Jacob pushed back immediately. He said that’s a legal technicality being used to sidestep a moral question.
And I said: ” No, it’s the opposite. It’s the law refusing to answer a question it was never designed to answer.
The question of when morally significant life begins is a genuine philosophical question. Serious thinkers have wrestled with it for centuries, arriving at different conclusions. Conception. Viability. Birth. Consciousness. There is no scientific instrument that resolves it. There is no argument that definitively closes it. It is genuinely, legitimately contested.
And when a question is genuinely contested at the level of fundamental values and metaphysics, the right answer for law in a pluralist society is not to pick one side’s answer and impose it on everyone else. The right answer is to operate in a space that doesn’t require resolving it.
The citizenship frame does exactly that. The pregnant person is a citizen. Their bodily autonomy is protected. The unborn is not yet a citizen under the established legal definition. The law does not need to decide when morally significant life begins because the law is not asking that question. It’s asking who a citizen is, and that question already has an answer.
What This Means for Jacob
I want to be careful here because this is the part that matters most.
Adopting the citizenship frame does not tell Jacob he is wrong. It does not say his belief is invalid. It does not dismiss the moral weight he assigns to life from conception.
What it says is this: Jacob has the absolute right to hold that belief, live by it, raise his children according to it, advocate for it, and persuade others of it. What he does not have is the right to use the law to impose that philosophical conclusion on people who have arrived at a different conclusion through equally sincere reasoning.
That’s not a liberal position. That’s the basic structure of how law works in a society with genuine philosophical diversity. You don’t get to use the government to settle metaphysical debates on behalf of everyone else.
Jacob sat with that for a while. He didn’t fully agree. He still thinks the moral stakes are too high to leave the question to individual conscience. But he understood the distinction I was drawing. And he understood that the citizenship frame wasn’t dismissing his values. It was locating them correctly, in the realm of personal conviction and community persuasion rather than legal compulsion.
The Deeper Problem We Kept Hitting
As we kept talking, something else came up that I think is even more important than the abortion question specifically.
We kept running into the same pattern. One group has a deeply held belief. They believe it is true. They believe following it is morally necessary. They believe everyone should live by it. And they use democratic power, whenever they have enough of it, to make everyone live by it whether they share the belief or not.
This is not unique to the pro-life position. It happens constantly across the political spectrum. It’s the fundamental failure mode of majority-rule democracy when it encounters genuine value disagreements.
Congressus has a specific mechanism designed to stop this. We call it the Private Sphere Doctrine. The core idea is simple: as long as you operate within the law, you have the right to live by your own values. You have no right to impose them on others through legal force just because you have majority support.
Jacob tested this immediately with a thought experiment. What if a majority of citizens decided everyone should pray five times a day? Should Congressus implement that?
No. Categorically. Religious practice is a private sphere matter. No majority can legislate inside another citizen’s private sphere. The harm test that governs these situations requires two things: the harm must be demonstrable through independent evidence, and the harmed party must be a specific, identifiable citizen. “This offends my community” doesn’t pass that test. “This violates our sacred tradition” doesn’t pass that test. Only actual demonstrable harm to actual identifiable people meets the standard.
That’s the mechanism that prevents Congressus from becoming a tool of ideological imposition, no matter which ideology happens to be in the majority at any given moment.
What the System Would Actually Propose
So after all of this, what would Congressus actually present to the American public on abortion?
After processing what millions of citizens genuinely believe, after the state agents negotiate using the citizenship frame as the operative legal concept, the proposal that would emerge looks roughly like this.
First-trimester access is federally protected and unrestricted. This covers over 90 percent of all abortions performed and reflects the clear position of the 73 percent in the middle.
Protections at any stage for rape, incest, serious health risk, and severe fetal anomalies. These have near-universal support across all positions, including most people who identify as pro-life.
State-level determination for the window between the first trimester and viability, within federal minimums. This reflects genuine regional differences in values without imposing either extreme nationally.
And then the thing that almost nobody talks about, because the political fight crowds it out: substantial federal investment in preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place. Contraception access. Comprehensive sex education. Maternal support. Adoption system reform. Economic support for parents who want to raise children but face real barriers.
That last piece is actually where Jacob and I found the most common ground. Because if you genuinely believe every conceived life matters, then you should be deeply invested in the conditions that make it possible for people to actually raise children. Reducing abortion by reducing unwanted pregnancy and supporting parents is something nearly everyone agrees on, regardless of where they stand on the legal question.
The system would present all of this with an honest acknowledgment attached: the philosophical question of when morally significant life begins is genuinely contested and cannot be resolved by policy. Congressus does not claim to answer it. It finds the terms under which people who answer it differently can live together.
Why Semantics Actually Matters
I know “it’s a vocabulary problem” sounds like a way of dodging the real issue. Jacob said as much. He said that calling it a semantic dispute felt like I was minimizing what he sees as a life-or-death moral question.
But here’s the thing. The most consequential fights in constitutional history have been semantic fights. Whether “all men are created equal” included Black people was a semantic question with catastrophic stakes. Whether “commerce among the states” included local manufacturing was a semantic question that shaped the entire 20th-century regulatory state. Whether “person” in the 14th Amendment includes corporations is a semantic question that transformed how money flows in politics.
The words matter more than almost anything else. Vague words in foundational documents are not neutral. They are open wounds that every generation fights over again. Precise words close those wounds.
The citizenship frame is not a trick or a technicality. It’s the law being honest about what it can actually do. It can define who a citizen is. It cannot resolve centuries of philosophical and theological disagreement about the metaphysics of personhood. It should stop pretending otherwise.
Where Jacob and I Landed
We didn’t resolve the abortion debate. I don’t think that’s actually possible between two people with genuinely different foundational commitments.
What we did resolve is this: the current political system is not serving Jacob’s actual values any better than it’s serving mine. The political fight over abortion has been going on for fifty years and has produced nothing but escalating conflict, geographic inequality in access, and endless fundraising for politicians on both sides who have every incentive to keep the fight going and none to resolve it.
Congressus wouldn’t give Jacob everything he wants. It wouldn’t give me everything I want either. What it would give both of us is the actual position of the 73 percent of Americans who have been voiceless in this debate for half a century. A position grounded in real human values, arrived at honestly, that neither side’s political apparatus has ever had any interest in implementing.
That’s not a perfect outcome. But it’s a real one. And right now, real is something this debate has been almost completely unable to produce.
Congressus is an open project. The complete architecture, the Foundation Floor, and the white paper are publicly available. No single entity owns it. It belongs to everyone it serves.
Whatever your position on abortion, whatever your values, whatever your faith: if you believe in genuine representation over political manipulation, this is worth your attention.
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