Seems to me the two main jobs spelled out for the federal government were to protect our borders and deliver the mail ... until they can do either one effectively, I don't think we should put anything more on their plate.
I believe that my view is more consistent with the vast majority of votersI'll bet you're right. So what? Are truth and morality now determined by majority rule? Is that another page we're taking from the left?
I think the GOP is responsibly trying to capture the hearts and minds of the larger voting block, that will in turn allow them to set policies that "keep the government out of the abortion business," thus protecting the majority of unplanned babies
I take exception to your use of "Unplanned".
Even with the partial exception of Artificial Lives concocted to spec in the lab, all human lives are essentially unplanned babies. Neither all the procreating in the world at a woman's peak fertility window nor Perfect Lab Condition will ensure a child is conceived.
We could hardly have rationalized the manufacture of Human Embryos for sale unless it were difficult to "plan" one's children successfully .
It also seems ironic you would cite the GOP's interest in protecting Unplanned children when it's the GOP who's now taken the unprecendented step of targeting Planned Children, even, by using "Excess" Planned Children -- destined for the trashbin -- as commodities suitable for the government human research (if killed timely). On which research, should it prove profitable after all, the Private Sector will base its use of Leftover human lives as mulch.
Perhaps, instead of "Planned" or "Unplanned", then ... you could take a page from the left and call them "Wanted" or "Unwanted" children.
Additionally, if the government is in the business of abortion, it's likely they took their cue from the GOP who used a certain incrementalism to open the door to government regulation -- while insisting they believed the ultimate arbiter was the state, not the feds -- in their 1970 federal report on population:
(Remember ... this is the GOP Task Force talking. Just for fun, see if you can spot all the "pages" the left lifted from them!! Note especially the use of "therapeutic" ... a word being bandied about at present with regard to the human cloning. Dum-de-dum-dum ...)
Ideally, our entire healthcare system should be overhauled to create less reliance on specialized medicine and overburdened hospitals and more dependence on para-medical professionals in providing healthcare services and more reliance on providing proper nutrition for all Americans.You see, although they were still tiptoeing around the Legal Abortion they characterized as "VITAL" to successful population control in 1974, it's the GOP who spearheaded in the 60's the government's taking charge of the healthcare system, providing birth control to the poor (in an effort to control their breeding and maintain ideal population differentials) and "Educating" the citizenry such that they understood the threat of overpopulation as well as their right to limit their reproduction. The report is very specific ... right down to the "right" for parents to determine and select the sex of their child.
The legality of abortion and of sterilization does not come under the jurisdiction of the federal government, but they are properly within the purview of state governments where medical laws are widely divergent. The most disturbing aspect of the abortion issue that was brought before the Task Force, is the disparity between the availability of professional abortion services to those women who can afford the $500-$700 to obtain a therapeutic abortion and the estimated one million illegitimate abortions performed by the unlicensed practitioners for those women who cannot afford professional service. It is apparent that many women who desire abortions take extreme measures, and subject themselves to dangerous methods in order to obtain an abortion.
It therefore seems that the main objective of abortion law revision should be to eradicate the increasing number of unlicensed and unqualified practitioners who jeopardize the health and safety of these women and to establish a system that eliminates discrimination resulting from present pricing structures.
It's George H. Bush who stated "population control" was actually a "healthcare mechanism". And it was Bush I's "Earth Resources and Population" task force findings in 1970 that noted quite clearly that the citizenry's failure to heed Education on population and the birth rate would indeed require the government to force certain strictures necessary to maintain State-mandated models for reproduction rates at home and abroad.
For, as the Task Force stated (quoting the American Academy of Sciences):
Either the birth rate must go back down or the death rate must go back up.
You may wish with all your heart you could lay the blame on Kennedy and Johnson and their Defense Secretary McNamara:
In 1977 Robert McNamara, as head of the World Bank, saw in population growth the "gravest issue" short of nuclear war and in a particularly prophetic statement lamented that the decisions that had led to this growth were "not in the exclusive control of a few governments but rather in the literally hundreds of millions of individual parents who will determine the outcome."
But, just as with PNTR for China for which the all-purpose fallguy Clinton took credit, it was really the GOP who made it happen.
If it makes you feel better, then, it's not the GOP who's the "Stupid Party" after all ... though one might be tempted to think thus now that the DNC's traditional long pig conditioning, Image Is Everything appeal, school-of-fish voting bloc tactics and ostracizing of anyone not "with us" as being somehow "against us" now are seen as suitable for use by our side.