Abortion, abhorrent as it is, is back where it ought to be - in the hands of the states.
The United States Supreme Court, in a Friday ruling expected after a draft of the decision was leaked in May, overturned in a 6-3 vote the constitutional right to abortion in a Mississippi case and gave individual states the power to allow, limit or ban the procedure.
The many millions of people who have pleaded, prayed and protested that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was wrongheaded and snuffed out the lives of 63 million future doctors, scientists, baseball players and plumbers can celebrate today.
But the decision to bring a child into the world, or to eliminate one, is not easy, and Friday's decision should not be seen as a time for gloating by those who are pro-life or for unrest by those who favor a federal abortion law.
Tennessee is one of 13 states which have "trigger laws" about abortion, meaning if a decision to end the federal right ever came along, state laws prohibiting or restricting abortion would immediately - or within weeks - go into place.
A Georgia law, ruled unconstitutional, bans abortions after six weeks. That law is likely to be revisited. Alabama's pre-Roe abortion ban remained on the books, so it will likely go into place.
However, we don't doubt, even in those states, the issue will come up again and again.
Other states will continue to permit abortions, some up to the child's due date.
Polls say Americans by a slim majority favor a constitutional right to abortion, but they diverge widely when caveats are put on the question.
(READ MORE: Reaction in Tennessee and Georgia from leaders welcoming the overturning of Roe v. Wade)
(READ MORE: Reaction in Tennessee and Georgia from leaders opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade)
For instance, two-thirds of Americans (64%) say unborn children should be protected later than 15 weeks, a point when scientists say they feel pain. Indeed, women more than men feel that way. Another poll finds half (50%) of Americans would protect the unborn after six weeks, when their hearts are already beating.
It is, in fact, the timing of abortion in the original Roe ruling that proved one of its downfalls.
The 49-year-old decision held that while states have "a legitimate interest in protecting potential life," the interest was not strong enough to prohibit abortions before the time of fetal viability, then believed to be about 23 weeks into pregnancy.
"The Court did not explain the basis for this line, and even abortion supporters have found it hard to defend Roe's reasoning," current Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion.
Today, almost everyone knows a "miracle child" who was born at less than 23 weeks of pregnancy and has survived. Advances through the years have allowed more people to see the sex of their child, to see fetal heartbeats and even to do surgery on a baby in the womb. It made the timeline argument practically indefensible.
Alito also shredded the reliance of the 1973 decision (and a subsequent one in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, saying the Due Process Clause has been found to guarantee certain rights not spelled out in the Constitution, but those rights are "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition."
Abortion, he said, "does not fall within this category," as "such a right was entirely unknown in American law" until the late 20th century.
The earlier decision, the Court wrote, "was egregiously wrong from the start," and "[i]ts reasoning was exceptionally weak[.]"
Supporters of abortion rights had hoped the doctrine of stare decisis - adhering to precedent (in this case Roe v. Wade) - would hold the day in deciding the Mississippi case, but the leaked draft cited numerous high court cases in which precedent was overturned. Most egregious of those was the 1857 Dred Scott decision in which justices decided that people of African descent - free or slave - were not United States citizens. The 13th and 14th Amendments, passed after the Civil War, effectively overturned the decision.
Chattanooga is not without an interesting history on the issue. In 1993, the Chattanooga Women's Clinic - open since 1975 and then the city's last remaining abortion clinic - closed its doors after years of protests against it, after the two co-owners died one after the other with cancer, and after the then-owner declared bankruptcy.
The building was auctioned out of bankruptcy, with a pro-life coalition - having raised money on the fly - bidding against a doctor who was a former worker at the clinic. Ultimately, the pro-life group bid $294,000 - all it had - and it was at that point the doctor quit bidding.
After that, the building was turned into the National Memorial for the Unborn, which it remains.
The city at the time, and frequently since then, was called the country's largest city without an abortion clinic.
Earlier this week, two planners of a local upcoming prayer gathering that was to center on the abortion decision prayed at Civil War sites around Chattanooga, knowledgeable that the war more than a century and a half ago was made inevitable by the aforementioned Dred Scott decision.
"We at the same time know that Roe v. Wade ... is a far worse constitutional error than Dred Scott," wrote Doug Daugherty, one of the planners who heads the local Hamilton Flourishing organization. "It has created a Civil War. It has united the followers of Christ. Nothing has ever divided this country like abortion ... ."
Though now an issue for the state, one might say a battle has been won. But the war for the hearts and minds of those with unwanted pregnancies - and how to provide assistance for them - goes on.