A Georgia judge’s ruling striking down the state’s six-week abortion ban isn’t likely to last. The case is headed to the Georgia Supreme Court, where eight of nine justices were appointed by a Republican governor, and which has reinstated the abortion law once before, when the same judge struck it down.

But the opinion, by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney, is worth paying attention to even if it is destined to be overturned. It offers one of the most compelling and straightforward defenses of the right to abortion that I have encountered in decades of writing about this issue.

Judicial writing about abortion tends to be fuzzy about the law and apologetic about the procedure, as in this famous passage from the now-overruled Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

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Not McBurney’s. A former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law School graduate appointed to the bench by a Republican governor, McBurney didn’t mince words as he found the Georgia law violated the state constitution.

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He called out the “awkwardly arbitrary” limit set by the Georgia abortion law, which prohibits abortion once there is a “detectable human heartbeat.” As McBurney observed, at this stage “the ‘heart’ is a tiny cluster of cells that periodically pulse, pushing blood through the quarter-inch embryo that still sports a vestigial tail.”

And why draw the line there? Georgia “was unable to articulate why a four- or five-week-old unborn child’s life was not worth enough to protect,” McBurney noted. “A five-week-old pregnancy is no more viable that a nine-week-old, but women are free to end such pregnancies (if they can detect them).”

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McBurney was blunt: Georgia, he wrote, “has seized upon a point in gestation that has political salience, rather than medical or moral salience.” Blunter still, and more important, he was unsparing in his language about what it means, legally and practically, to force women to continue pregnancies against their will.

As a legal matter, “Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote,” McBurney wrote. “Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.”

As a practical matter, McBurney was even clearer about the implications of requiring women to “serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability.”

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“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could — or should — force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another,” McBurney wrote. “... When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

Bravo! This is exactly the point. It’s why the blather about leaving this decision up to individual states gets things wrong. The choice is for the woman to make, not the government, at any level.

Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson made this case in 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade. She analogized the competing rights of the pregnant woman and the fetus to someone kidnapped to have their kidneys used to save a famous violinist. The person is informed, “To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months.”

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Thomson presses the case further. “What if the director of the hospital says, ‘Tough luck. I agree[,] but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life,” she wonders. “Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So, you cannot ever be unplugged from him.’ I imagine you would regard this as outrageous.”

Yes. Outrageous when Thomson posed it as a thought experiment in moral philosophy. Outrageous when Georgia, and so many other states, impose it as a matter of ideological dictate, this time with real-world consequences.