This is tantamount to a free will argument. The religious argument goes, why would God give mankind the power to chose unless that choice is an important one. By that argument Christians must choose to have Jesus in their life. Likewise, citizens should have the power to choose life for the right reasons, but they need to be free to make that choice for moral, ethical, social, and religious reasons.
Abortions can be stopped, if we eliminate unwanted pregnancies. We must stop rapes, incest, unsafe sex, and foolish abstinence-only sex education (abstinence has a place, amongst other choices, but relying on it alone is just silly). We must improve health care for young and poor mothers so having a child is not a career crippling event. That is the right way to prevent abortions, and I think Americans are waking up to that fact.
Like prohibition, making abortions illegal is an ineffective technique to achieve a worthy goal. People need to be free to choose to do the right thing, or the wrong one; and we need to make it possible to do the right thing by supporting them. The key word in "choose life" is the choice. Obama sees that, and will effectively prevent far more abortions than our stacked supreme court.
To be clear, I am not in favor of legal bans on abortions. I'm just pointing out that this is not something you can persuade someone to a different viewing, at least that is my opinion anyway.
Either way compassion toward the mother is more Christ-like than stoning her for breaking any law.
We are all pro-life. And we should not concede the term to them. But arch-conservatives have a really narrow way of describing and defining what it means to be "Pro-Life." We are pro-life because we believe that every life should be wanted and nurtured. To aid in that, most of us (most Americans, not just progressives) believe family planning should be available to anyone wanting it. We are pro life because we care more about living people than the merest "possibility" of a pregnancy before fertilization and implantation. We do not reify or even deify abstractions about eggs and sperm. We know that, in the normal process of nature, most eggs and sperm never unite to create a child. We know that birth control is not "abortion," as the fringe-niks try to persuade.
We care about those who are hungry. And those who don't have a roof over their heads. We care about children needing homes. We care about those displaced by war, and especially those who die because of war. We believe that war should never be waged based on a lie (to do otherwise is decidedly anti-life). We want no innocent person to be executed--ever (and don't give us the "we need finality" argument). Either you care about justice and life or you don't. And you do not if you would put to death anyone who was wrongly convicted.
Unlike John McCain we don't treat the roughly 2,000 women a year requiring medically necessary late-term abortions to have trivial health complaints, but rather life-endangering emergencies where doctors must act quickly to save either the mother, child or both. We know the doctors did their best to save whomever they could save. And, yes, we were offended in the snide and sneering way McCain talked about these unfortunate women--all who wanted their babies-- during the debate. These women who experienced crises deserve our sympathy and support, not our demonizing. And that's because we are pro-life--and so are they. The data do not support the radical wrong contention that women are going around getting rid of late trimester pregnancies without real medical emergencies. And we believe that to encumber doctors acting in their patients' best interest under extreme pressure, is to be inhumane, arbitrary, and an abuse of power by the state.
Finally, we see through all the spin and nonsense. We know there are already laws on the books of the several states dealing with limitations on 2nd and 3rd term abortions. The rhetoric, and the legislating against a procedure, rather than a time-frame, is designed to eliminate and criminalize all abortions, even in the first trimester before there is even a functioning brain.
We also know that at the end of life, we define it in terms of brain function. But, curiously, not for some, at the beginning.
I am pro-life, but I also (most fortunately) very much wanted all my pregnancies. Because that is true I cannot judge one who really believes she must make a choice other than to carry on with the pregnancy. I hope we do not move to that kind of draconian future where the state arbitrarily decides who must carry on. If they can do that, they (the same state) can also decide who CAN. Its' worth thinking about.
I am going to forward your comment to a few people, you managed to show that this is a difficult issue and it needs to be addressed accordingly.
Thank you!
"One attorney for the hospital argued that it was appropriate to sacrifice a dying woman for her fetus..."
Our founding fathers - as well as those at the time of Christ - lived with not just pregnancy termination, but infanticide. Solomon's position to split a baby in half for the two arguing parents is generally recognized to be his response to the fact that the two prostitutes had just been witness to the ritual sacrifice of one of their babies. In the late 1700s, John Adams commented on the French practice of leaving unwanted babies outside. That doesn't make the practice right. It just makes a regulation of abortion as unConstitutional.
In fact, the Ninth Amendment: declares that the individual rights listed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights is not meant to be a comprehensive list; and that the other rights not specifically mentioned are retained elsewhere by the people. The Tenth Amendment provides that powers that the Constitution does not delegate to the United States and does not prohibit the States from exercising, are "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." To suggest the right to privacy is one of those rights given to the state seems anti-thetical. A right to privacy that isn't an individual right-NOT A STATE RIGHT- isn't much of a privacy right at all.