Because any true compromise must cut the issue exactly down the middle, regardless of the reasonableness of the positions taken by the various parties, or the likely consequences thereof.
(have fun ignoring this rebuttal like you have my prior two in this thread)
~

I won't respond to many posts that have a sarcasm line on it. Actually, your previous comment had one as well.

If you care to post a comment without sarcasm, I'd be glad to respond to it.

So, if we're debating pollution from automobile exhaust, is a fair compromise one that eliminates most of the cards from the road?

Squeak, maybe you need to explain exactly what qualifies as "compromise" in your view.

The vast majority of abortions take place early in the first trimester. That's the case now, and it has been the case for centuries. Generations of thinkers, including many in the Catholic Church and among our very own Founding Fathers, had no problem with a woman inducing abortion before "quickening" (roughly the second trimester), though they penalized abortion very heavily after that point.

In what possible way is following centuries of legal and moral thought, and writing into secular rather than religious law a set of prohibitions on late-term abortions, in any way a left-wing position?

Saying a compromise always has to be in the middle is merely encouraging extremists to move as far to the fringes as they can stomach. Yet I don't see any liberals advocating for unrestricted abortion anytime during pregnancy for any reason. I do see conservatives asking for ironclad prohibitions on abortion, including in cases of rape or incest. Who, pray tell, are the extremists here?

Pro-choice is a conservative position -- assuming that conservatives still believe in individual freedom and responsibility. Perhaps you need to explain that, too, since the issue seems in doubt.

Personally I do believe that abortion should be legal and freely available (not necessisarily in teh economic sense) up until birt. This however is primarilly because I trust the judgement of the woman over the ability of any government legislation to correctly regulate such a complex and intimately personal decision.
And personally I feel anyone describing themselves as Libertarian who feels the government should regulate the womb is a liar and a hypocrite.

Unless you consider an individual/life starts as an embryo. Then those 'individuals' aren't given any freedom at all.

So what changes from the few seconds that a child is in the womb and out of the womb?

Could you 'abort' a fetus after it was born? What caused the difference?

I believe that Silveroak takes it too far. Abortion should, as it is, be freely available up until the end of the first trimester. After that, the restrictions on it should become steadily tougher and require actual medical justifications. This means that you have long enough to decide if you want to have the child or not, while at the same time making sure that you aren't actually ending an independent life without a very good reason. I do believe that late term abortions are necessary, but only in cases where the only choice is between lives, situations where giving birth will result in the death of one or both of the mother and child.

You people discussing this (banned) topic are all men.

Hey, what other women's health subject do men like to talk about a lot? I know! Birth control!

But I digress with my feminist rage.

Before I saw this abortion crap here, I was going to say something about how Watergate damaged trust in government and we all still feel that deep down inside. Iran-Contra didn't help. Neither did the Iraq WMD debacle, or the new Congressional insider trading thing.

And lots of Americans are really, really angry right now, about a wide variety of subjects. Angry people don't do rational, reasoned political discourse. Which is why I was gonna say, but now I'm not.

And, as I hope is clear from this discussion, reasonable people can differ on that point. Religious reasons are unacceptable bases for a law, since that would violate the First Amendment. And secular, scientific evidence can be given in support of either side. Therefore the genuine conservative position would seem to be to leave the complex issue up to individual interpretation rather than enforcing one group's opinion on all others.

Don't like abortion? Don't have one. Feel it's against God's law? Let God take care of it. Want to encourage others to avoid abortion? Great. Want to forbid abortion beyond the existing compromise position? Whoa, Nelly.

Freedom means the freedom to disagree; liberty includes the liberty to do something even if I don't like it. I admire many conservative positions; but when conservative ethics get entangled with busybody religious moralizing, that seems to lead quite quickly to cognitive dissonance and public ridicule. If conservatives don't want to be lambasted, they might consider separating themselves from absolutist religious rhetoric and moving more toward the "classical liberalism" that inspired them.

(Checks rules). Oops.

I publicly apologize for following up on Squeak's invitation to the topic, and hope my responses have been moderate enough to ameliorate my violation of the topic ban.

For the purposes of this discussion just not mentioning abortion would be an issue and common sense needs to be applied.

Anyone invoking terms relating to specific interpretations of when life begins needs to rethink.