Túrin Turambar wrote:The thing is, every contentious question must be resolved somewhere. To me, saying abortion should be decided by state legislatures isn't making a statement on your position on abortion any more than saying it should be decided by the Supreme Court or Congress is. There are a significant number of people who are pro-life but believe abortion is an issue for the state legislatures (from memory, Ted Cruz is one). Because these people are accepting that abortion will probably be legalised in some states, by Frelga's and V's logic, they aren't actually pro-life. In that case, what are they?
That's not correct, Túrin. The vast majority of those who identify themselves as "pro-life"(including Ted Cruz) believe that abortion is taking a life and should be illegal in all circumstances. They would support a nation-wide ban on abortion if there was any political reality that it could happen. But because there is no such reality, and is unlikely to be in any foreseeable future (in order for that happen, the GOP would need to keep the White House and the House of Representative and gain a super-majority of at least 60 senators who did not include pro-choice moderates like Collins and Murkowski), the best they can hope for is to allow the decision to be made by a state-by-state basis, since in many states, they do hold such power. The one exception in Congress is probably Rand Paul. As for pro-choice, the term is generally accepted in the U.S. to mean believing that a woman has a right, implied in and therefore guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, to make her own choices about reproductive rights. Like any right guaranteed in the Constitution (like, say, the right to bear arms), that right is subject to reasonable regulation by the states, but cannot be taken away by the states. Any person can, of course, call themselves "pro-choice" or "pro-life" (or any other term) and mean whatever they want by those terms. But under the accepted definition of those terms, someone who is pro-life believes that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances other than to save the life of the woman, and someone who is pro-choice believes that no state should be able to abolish or ban abortion.
As a practical matter, there are only two basic possibilities moving forward in the U.S. Abortion will continue to be legal throughout the country, but subject to some degree of regulation by the states and the U.S. government (an example of the U.S. government regulating abortion was the so-called partial birth abortion ban that was passed by Congress in 2003 and signed by President Bush, and then upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court in
Gonzales v. Carhart in 2007 (I say "so-called" because medically there is no such thing as a partial birth abortion and what the law actually does is ban intact dilation and extraction. The Supreme Court had previously invalidated a broader so-called partial birth abortion ban passed in Nebraska in 2000 in
Stenberg v. Carhart.)
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."