After more than seven hours of emotional testimony this week, a House subcommittee neatly sidestepped the volatile question of when life begins. The panel voted to table House Resolution 536, which called for a constitutional amendment defining legal personhood as beginning at conception, a definition that would criminalize abortion and some forms of birth control.

The 4-3 vote offers some reassurance to the many thousands of Georgians who believe that abortion should remain safe, legal and rare. However, the direction of the debate and the fact that 75 House members signed the bill portends more pitched battles ahead over a woman's right to control her own reproductive destiny.

In advocating the tabling of the resolution, state Rep. Edward Lindsey (R-Atlanta) warned that if passed by voters, the broad constitutional amendment would spark a lawsuit. And that in turn would give an unelected federal judge the authority to decide the complex questions that arise from according a constitutional right to life to a single-cell zygote.

A judge would decide, for example, whether it is morally right to force a 12-year-old impregnated through rape or incest to carry the pregnancy to term, as the sponsors of the resolution maintain.

Would methods of birth control, such as IUDs, that prevent an embryo from implanting in the womb suddenly become murder weapons? Would the amendment put an end to in vitro fertilization, which often produces unused embryos that are later destroyed? Could a woman be prosecuted if she failed to obtain prenatal care and miscarried? What if it came down to a choice between the mother's life or the life of a fetus?

Who decides?

Facing a crowded hearing room, Lindsey argued that such questions are too important to leave to the courts. "I feel we should trust our legislators more than we trust our judges in their black robes," he said.

He's wrong. Women should trust neither legislators nor judges with these personal and private decisions.

They should trust themselves.

The prospect of the General Assembly deciding acceptable birth control or whether women can end a pregnancy ought to terrify Georgians. To understand the dangers of allowing government to commandeer women's reproductive choices, look to China and Romania.

Seeking to increase his labor force, dictator Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania denied women access to contraceptives, outlawed abortion and forbade sex education. "The fetus is the property of the entire society," he said in 1966.

The Romanian government investigated miscarriages, performed surprise gynecological exams on female factory workers and imposed a tax on the childless. Births rose for a time, but so did back-alley abortions, maternal and infant deaths, poverty and the number of children living in orphanages. During Ceausescu's two decades in power, illegal abortions killed more than 10,000 Romanian women, and 200,000 children ended up in the 600 state-run orphanages.

After Ceausescu was executed in 1989, America and the rest of the world had their first glimpse into those institutions and saw babies warehoused in cribs, toddlers tied to chairs and skeletal teenagers in diapers.

In China, government policy sought the opposite goal of fewer births. The nation's one-child policy led to allegations of coerced abortions and severe penalties for couples who defied goverment by having a second child. The cultural preference for boys coupled with the one-child rule led to an increase in the abandonment of girl babies and in the abortion of female fetuses.

Both the Romanian and Chinese policies share something important in common: a basic disrespect for the ability of women to make their own decisions. A similar lack of respect was also apparent in testimony last week before the Georgia House subcommittee.

For example, H. Edward Hales, an attorney and Georgia Right to Life board member, drew an audible gasp from the audience when he claimed that under current law, a woman now can choose to get an abortion "because she got up on the wrong side of the bed," as if that's all the thought that women give to such a personal decision.

The amendment itself diminishes women's worth. David Oedel, a Mercer University Law School professor, said the amendment could be read to mean that "the health or life of a pregnant woman would necessarily be disregarded to give way to protect the rights of even a fragile fetus, in an extreme condition."

The goal of HR 536 is to stop the 30,000 abortions performed annually in Georgia, yet the sponsors never suggest more effective options such as greater access to birth control or comprehensive sex education. That's because this resolution does not see women as any more than wombs. The lives, health and adult judgment of those who actually possess the wombs in question — in other words, women — are dismissed as secondary.

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board