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I wish I could understand why conservatives continue to pursue the abortion issue. Ironically, it is the republican version of the gun control argument and suffers from the same disregard for reality. If you make guns illegal, you will not stop people from having guns, it will just force people to break the law, by the same token, making abortion illegal will not stop abortion, just force people to break the law. Yet conservatives continue to hold on to this ludicrous ideal, just as liberals continue to hold on to the ideal of gun control, regardless of its unreasonableness.

I have always considered conservatives to be the more rational party, yet their clinging to this issue makes me wonder if they won't end up becoming as disassociated with reality as the liberals. I realize there is a "religious" basis for this stance, but God gave humans free will, why can't the conservatives?

The party's extremist stance on this issue is what keeps the moderates away from the Republican party and the only people who benefit are the Democrats.

If you make guns illegal, you will not stop people from having guns, it will just force people to break the law, by the same token, making abortion illegal will not stop abortion, just force people to break the law.

You might as well argue that since making the murder of the post-born illegal has not stopped the practice, it might as well be made legal. Before abortion was legalized, very few abortions actually took place. Read some of the things early legal abortion proponents have to say on the subject--wish I could remember the name, but I remember one guy saying that the numbers both on illegal abortions and women dying from the same were grossly exaggerated in order to sway public opinion.

As far as the "extremist" pro-life views driving away "moderate" Republicans, guess what triggered my move away from the Democrat party? If you guess "their extremist view on abortion," you've got it. Check the polls: abortion does NOT have majority support. Sure, the headlines on the polls will often claim that, but when you dig in and look at the numbers, you'll find that the poll's authors have lumped in people supporting abortion in the case of rape, fetal abnormality, or immediate danger to the mother's life (which together account for less than 10% of abortions) with those who support abortion as a form of birth control, presumably because the authors didn't like the actual results of the poll.

Furthermore, the only "religious" reason I can see for people to be against abortion is that murder IS one of the ten commandments, and thus is forbidden. It is science, not the bible, that tells us that the pre-born is a living human being. I have great faith in the accuracy of science.

I wish I could understand why conservatives continue to pursue the abortion issue.>>>

For one thing it's the platform of the republican party.
http://www.rnc.org/GOPInfo/Platform/2000platform4.htm

Secondly, when abortion was illegal, there were no where near 1.2 million abortions per year!
If you make it illegal as it was for many years, the rates will drop fast and people will be much more cautious to prevent pregnancies.

You wrote: "I wish I could understand why conservatives continue to pursue the abortion issue."

The Magna Carta

...here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break. This reaffirmation of a supreme law and its expression in a general charter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone justifies the respect in which men have held it.

--Winston Churchill, 1956

King John of England agreed, in 1215, to the demands of his barons and authorized that handwritten copies of Magna Carta be prepared on parchment, affixed with his seal, and publicly read throughout the realm. Thus he bound not only himself but his "heirs, for ever" to grant "to all freemen of our kingdom" the rights and liberties the great charter described. With Magna Carta, King John placed himself and England's future sovereigns and magistrates within the rule of law.

When Englishmen left their homeland to establish colonies in the New World, they brought with them charters guaranteeing that they and their heirs would "have and enjoy all liberties and immunities of free and natural subjects." Scant generations later, when these American colonists raised arms against their mother country, they were fighting not for new freedoms but to preserve liberties that dated to the 13th century.

When representatives of the young republic of the United States gathered to draft a constitution, they turned to the legal system they knew and admired--English common law as evolved from Magna Carta. The conceptual debt to the great charter is particularly obvious: the American Constitution is "the Supreme Law of the Land," just as the rights granted by Magna Carta were not to be arbitrarily canceled by subsequent English laws.

This heritage is most clearly apparent in our Bill of Rights. The fifth amendment guarantees

No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

and the sixth states

...the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.

Written 575 years earlier, Magna Carta declares

No freeman shall be taken, imprisoned,...or in any other way destroyed...except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to none will we deny or delay, right or justice.

In 1957 the American Bar Association acknowledged the debt American law and constitutionalism had to Magna Carta and English common law by erecting a monument at Runnymede. Yet, as close as Magna Carta and American concepts of liberty are, they remain distinct. Magna Carta is a charter of ancient liberties guaranteed by a king to his subjects; the Constitution of the United States is the establishment of a government by and for "We the People."

The Mayflower Compact

IN The Name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, &c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honor of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. In WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth and of Scotland, the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620

The above interpretation © 1995 on the HTML-version by Dep. Alfa-Informatica University of Groningen. Copying for non-commercial purposes allowed, if proper citation is given.Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

U.S. Constitution Amendment XIV

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The Emancipation Proclamation
January 1, 1863
A Transcription

By the President of the United States of America:

A Proclamation.

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free;

Neonatal children are neither the slaves nor the property of their parents and deserve the full protection of our country and its laws as guaranteed by the above.

I didn't know that only conservatives believed in these ideas and laws.

The Gospel of Life Pope John Paul II

The incomparable worth of the human person

2. Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God. The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase. Life in time, in fact, is the fundamental condition, the initial stage and an integral part of the entire unified process of human existence. It is a process which, unexpectedly and undeservedly, is enlightened by the promise and renewed by the gift of divine life, which will reach its full realization in eternity (cf. 1 Jn 3:1-2). At the same time, it is precisely this supernatural calling which highlights the relative character of each individual's earthly life. After all, life on earth is not an "ultimate" but a "penultimate" reality; even so, it remains a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters.

The Church knows that this Gospel of life, which she has received from her Lord,(1) has a profound and persuasive echo in the heart of every person—believer and non-believer alike—because it marvellously fulfils all the heart's expectations while infinitely surpassing them. Even in the midst of difficulties and uncertainties, every person sincerely open to truth and goodness can, by the light of reason and the hidden action of grace, come to recognize in the natural law written in the heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15) the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree. Upon the recognition of this right, every human community and the political community itself are founded.

In a special way, believers in Christ must defend and promote this right, aware as they are of the wonderful truth recalled by the Second Vatican Council: "By his incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every human being".(2) This saving event reveals to humanity not only the boundless love of God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (Jn 3:16), but also the incomparable value of every human person.

making abortion illegal will not stop abortion, just force people to break the law.

Making it illegal to murder born people hasn't eliminated that, either; is that another bad law?

Hey buddy, get ready to duck. The fanactic who are in a rampage to control every aspect of one's personal affairs, what we can read, what movie we can see, what ABC can broadcast, the saying of "dirty" words (as though words had an inherent quality apart from the context of their uttering), and the reproductive conduct of an otherwise free person, are gonna be all over you like white on rice.

I wish I could understand why conservatives continue to pursue the abortion issue.

Are you a neocon?

Neocons strike me as people who are conservative about only one thing:

money.

And that the neocon definition of freedom is the ability to spend their money on whatever sick and perveted and immoral vice they feel like.

There’s nothing “rational” about killing babies.