Pro-Choice Republican

Well, right on cue the Supreme court has handed down an Abortion ruling which guarantees that abortion will be a campaign issue this cycle. Uggh. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=3052624

The moral gordian knot of abortion is insoluable. The pro-choice crowd will tell you that this is a moral choice to be made by the woman in whose body the child is developing, on whose body the child utterly depends. The right to life crowd will tell you human life begins at conception and that the defenseless child must be protected. Both sides have their merit. Neither side can bear to see the United States legislate against their moral conviction on the subject. The pro-lifer's can not bear to see a pregnancy terminated; the pro-choicers can not bear to have a woman forced to carry an unwanted child (which in practice it can not anyway, these women will find a way to terminate regardless of the law, sometimes unthinkable ways.)

That this debate is based on belief, moral conviction, religion, gender equality and so on is exactly why The Law of the Land should not prescribe nor proscribe abortion. To impose any belief on everyone( i.e. you must abort, you must not abort) is simply un-American. We are a secular, pleuralistic, and tolerant nation. Just as a woman may choose to wear a burka, she can not be forced to, no matter how strong someone's conviction on the subject may be.

The conservative movement's pro-life stance is perhaps its single most counter productive position. It is a root cause of the hatred and fear of George Bush. Many are terrified that Bush would seek to harshly impose his religiously based anti-abortion stance.

While I do not have a firm stance on partial birth abortion, I strongly suspect that today's ruling is a mistake. Far from a victory for conservatives, the Supreme court's decision today to ban partial birth abortion may hand the next presidential election to the Democrats. I can not imagine a turn of events more galvanizing for Hillary Clinton's base. Rightly or not, there are few things Democrats fear more than a slippery slope to overturning Roe v. Wade.