General Discussion
Showing Original Post only (View all)Being pro-life doesn’t make me any less of a lefty [View all]
Being pro-life doesnt make me any less of a lefty
Abortion is one of those rare political issues on which left and right seem to have swapped ideologies.
BY MEHDI HASAN PUBLISHED 11 OCTOBER 2012
Listening to fellow pundits on the left react with rage and disbelief to the support by the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, for halving the abortion time limit to 12 weeks, I was reminded of the late Christopher Hitchens. [A]nyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with a textbook on embryology knows that emotions are not the deciding factor [in abortions], wrote the Hitch in his column for the Nation magazine in April 1989. In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain . . . break some bones and rupture some organs.
It is often assumed that the great contrarians break with the liberal left came over Iraq in 2003. His self-professed pro-life position, however, had provoked howls of anguish in progressive circles 14 years earlier. It has long been taken as axiomatic that in order to be left-wing you must be pro-choice. Yet Hitchenss reasoning was not just solid but solidly left-wing. It was a pity, he noted, that the majority of feminists and their allies have stuck to the dead ground of Me Decade possessive individualism, an ideology that has more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claims to oppose but has in fact encouraged.
----------
Rest at link: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/2012/10/being-pro-life-doesnt-make-me-any-less-lefty
In my personal opinion, making contraception easily available and affordable to those most likely to have an abortion would solve things much faster. The Republican party has been running on a pro-life platform for decades, but beyond trying to get pro-life judges in (and generally failing) they have no ideas on how to accomplish their own goals besides random legislation here or there that doesn't really tackle things. It is more of an issue they use to display how holy they are, and to get people pissed off and ready to vote against the heathens on the left. A smart Democratic candidate can steal some of this vote by demonstrating the effectiveness of progressive policies in reducing abortion rates and by expressing pro-life positions.