Now personally I consider myself to be pretty solidly pro choice, but regardless of where you stand, do you think Americans are wasting time by debating abortion?
There has been a lot of talk about whether you should vote for Barak Obama or Mitt Romney based on their stance on abortion. But is it even relevant?
No President can outlaw abortion. Abortion was legalized in America thanks to Roe V. Wade, and that was a supreme court decision. Congress can't trump the supreme court, and nor can the president.
I doubt Bush (either of them), Reagan, or any other conservatives that were president after Roe V. Wade liked abortion, but they couldn't outlaw it anyway. Because again, it's a supreme court decision, the president can't do anything about it.
So I hear religious groups trying to get abortion outlawed, even though it's obviously never going to happen (unless the supreme court magically changes their mind one day) meanwhile women's rights groups fiercely defending abortion, as if its legality is actually in any danger. It's not.
They can, however,
remove court jurisdiction and give the issue back to the states.
They won't though, because the GOP needs it. If abortion was given back to the state legislators, the GOP would, as Celtic mentioned, lose votes. They'd rather see it legal everywhere and look like they are fighting it than to have the issue completely irrelevant to anything Federal.
I absolutely think it is worth discussing. While a lot of people on here have their minds made up, there are a lot of people in real life who are pro-choice without really knowing why, or being internally inconsistent (Saying that abortion is murder but that it is still a woman's right to choose) and I think those types of people can be convinced. I don't think they are very common, but if there are any pro-lifers that don't believe that a fetus is a human life but still want abortion banned for some other reason, they too could probably be convinced to be pro-choice.
I do not, however, think it was a valid reason to vote for Mitt Romney. Romney is pretty obviously pro-choice anyway. Its just so obvious from the way he's flip flopped on the issue. At least to me. He wouldn't do a single thing about it.
Romney probably wouldn't have expanded abortion like Obama, but saying you'll vote for Romney just because he won't let anyone else to be killed without doing a thing about the people that are being killed which is an order of magnitude greater than the amount of new killings he might stop, well, I don't think its worth it. Romney would have been unworthy of my vote. Gary Johnson is more pro-life than Romney, yet he claims to be pro-choice.
The GOP doesn't want to outlaw abortion, they just say that they do because they want the evangelical and Catholic vote. If there are less abortions, then there will be more poor people who likely wouldn't vote for Republicans.
This.
The way the GOP strings together the 'no birth control' issues with 'no abortions' seems absolutely insane and counterproductive to me.
That's not really the GOP so much as very small parts of it (Santorum is really the only name that comes to mind, and even he
said he wouldn't ban birth control although I think he might be lying.) A lot of them might not want the public to pay for contraception, but that's more a free market principle than a moral one. Which, admittedly, it does make little sense to combine a "Morals" party with a free market party anyway (A Libertarian party vs some kind of Christian socialist party would make more rational sense and would contain less internal contradictions), that statement doesn't really apply to abortion because there's more to abortion than just trying to enforce morality on people.
On the one hand, many people are against abortion, even a slim majority (though pretty much everyone but the clergy support rape, incest and life of mother exeptions).
I don't
And I'm not in the clergy! I exist!
I agree with you that the reality is that an across the board (Other than when the life of the mother is endangered) ban isn't likely to actually happen, but that's still my view. And IIRC about 22% of the country agrees with me, (Most of them are probably hardcore social conservatives. I'm not, which probably puts me in a category containing less than 1% of the population
) But I still don't actually agree with it, that's my view, and I exist
But the way it's talked about by the GOP is offensive to many people - especially women. I've said this before but it bears repeating: When you start with the position 'no exceptions', you wind up with Todd Akins in the general election blowing it for the whole party.
What do you mean by "Starting with"?
I think what you sare saying is to actually compromise our own principles in order to keep crazies like Todd Akin out. I can't do that. I could vote for someone who had the wrong view on the rape issue, but I don't believe in it and I can't exactly change that.
On the other hand, going against contraception is just stupid in light of a pro-life stance. A big, easy point of bipartisan common ground could easily be 'pro-contraception'. It cuts the rate of abortions and unwanted pregnancies (which in turn lead to the dreaded 'welfare' babies and gubnit handouts). Everyone but the clergy wins on this.
Its really only the Catholic clergy
But when you stand against contraception in various ways, be it government sponsored contraception, employer/insurer sponsored contraception or even sex-ed, you are going to increase the rate of abortions.
Yeah, I'm against government intervention just because of free market principles but I am absolutely not in favor of "Abstinence only" and while I do not think the government should force any health insurance company to provide contraception, people can and should try to get the message out that not doing so is contributing to a far worse problem.
Plus, calling women like Sandra Fluke a slut on talk radio just because she wanted to testify about contraception in Congress is the epitome of stupid. Hell, even refusing her and any other women a chance to testify while allowing basically only the clergy to testify is wacker than crack.
It was Rush Limbaugh, what do you expect?
The hope on the far right is that if they elect a conservative enough president, he will appoint conservative justices who will then vote against abortion. Not sure it would happen, even with a very conservative Supreme Court. But that's their guiding light on the right.
The courts won't do it. Nullification may in a few states though. I'd be curious how it would play out. Mississippi tried recently, and while I can't prove it I believe the only reason it didn't happen (Note: In Mississippi, I'm well aware if you tried this in, say, California the results would be very different
) is because of the fact that some ambiguities in the bill may have also affected regular BC pills, and that there were absolutely ZERO exceptions (Even for a mother's life.) Even so, it got 45%. (I honestly would have voted for it, I want the mother's life exception, and I don't want non-abortive BC pills affected by it, but I would still vote to save human life.)
I think if they can get a more reasonable bill on the ballot they could probably get through bans in most red states. (At least some of which would almost certainly have rape exceptions.)
As an issue abortion was decided a couple decades ago.
There isn't really any problem debating it, but who wants society to turn back the wheel and go a couple steps back in terms of progress? That's just not going to happen.
