And I remember that speech Sen. Clinton gave and she did sound very reasonable, but like you point out that’s not how she sounds now. It was a nice gesture that she could afford in an off-cycle year which got people excited. Sort of like when her husband said he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.”

Hopefully we can go to more of that. But probably not this year.

There are extremists on the issue, of course, who aren’t overvocal about it, who focus more on practice than insult, and so on, but they get drowned out by the louder voices. (If you insist that you’re one of those, though, i suspect that you’ve got a better than 50-50 chance of being self-delusional.)

I’m a liberal Democrat who’s emphatically not a Clinton (H or B) fan, but i tend to think Ms. Clinton got it right a few years ago when she pointed out that the focus among both pro- and anti-abortion sorts ought to be working on the root causes that lead people to abortion, and then once we get through *that* we can worry about the stuff on the margins that we’re spending way too much energy on now.

Not that i think she (or pretty much anyone else) is really doing that right now, but i do believe that the abortion argument in the US at the moment is pretty much a case of trimming the leaves rather than hacking away at the roots.

I deal with extreme conservatism on a daily basis. It comes with living in Rexburg, ID. My issue is less with with Conservative Republicans and more with the conservative movement types such as Weyrich, Norquist, and Dobson (though they have become very strong in the GOP). On the left, I have the same issue with Marxists. Extreme ideology is scary.

I do not view you as fitting anywhere close to this. Your father is surely not, though he is still a conservative. However, I cannot imagine how he deals with the wing-nuts in the Utah legislature.

I bet McCain would be willing to listen to RFC, at least more than most.

Thank you too.

In the Gerson article, he used Democrats for Life. I wonder if McCain will be listening to proposals made by Republicans for Choice.

If we could ban PBA but protect abortion before 28 weeks, I would be fine with that. I was part of the pro-life movement long enough to not trust them.

Thanks for the good debate.

On the other side, the worst case scenario is argued to allow any and all abortions at any time. That’s a big difference.

But I think you’re right in the larger sense. But what’s wrong with that?

Abortion supporters do the exact same thing if not worse, by citing the worst case scenarios for rhetorical purposes.

Instead of citing the 99.9% cases where abortion is performed, the slightest proposed restriction is struck down by invoking the 0.0001% of cases where an abusive father raped her daughter. Therefore, every girl needs abortion on demand w/o parental notification.

Pro-lifers have gone no where until the PBA ban. Despite Pres. Clinton’s and Democrats’ claim that they want abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare” they are so beholden to abortion, they refuse to do anything to restrict it.

PBA was a useful issue in putting the lie to that claim.

So I think we agree. I just don’t have a problem with it.

“its gruesome reality illustrates the nature of all abortions.”

This is what I am talking about.

I don’t understand why there’s any doubt that Obama supports all abortions, partial-birth or otherwise. Gerson may be a hack (I actually don’t like his so-called “compassionate conservative” moralism myself) but I don’t think the facts on Obama’s record are in dispute.

How’s partial-birth abortion a straw-man? It’s practiced and its gruesome reality illustrates the nature of all abortions. The general public may be more pro-choice than conservatives would like, but PBAs are so repugnant that even that ban got through Congress four (?) times and finally signed by Bush.

Abortion can be regulated, the question is how much. Sen. Obama seems to think no regulation is necessary and my bet is most feel that is extreme.

“Having endorsed partial-birth abortion.” What crap. And Gerson knows it. While Gerson like to be the moral voice of the right, he cannot avoid his past as a paritisan hack.

The Democrat is pro-choice. Is this a shocker? Partial-birth is a controversy invented by the pro-life movement because its general position on legalized abortion is losing its appeal. If all else fails, bring in the straw man.

(Wow, to think that I got kicked out of a sociology class at Sherwood High School for wearing an abrasive anti-abortion shirt.)