Remember, it was semi-isolationist Christian conservatives who went for Huckabee back in Iowa, spring 2008. Huckabee said that Bush had an "arrogant bunker mentality," and voters responded. It was the ocean touching, pro-choice New Hampshirites who favored McCain's neo-con message of chasing Bin Laden to the gates of hell.

Where I live, in the midwest, we have lots of volunteers, and some casualties, in Iraq. A member of my family volunteered, and died, in Vietnam. Michael Moore observed this in his 9/11 movie. Volunteering is not the same as warmongering. Paradoxically, many pro-life people are willing to serve, even while being skeptical of our war chiefs and propogandists in Washington and New York.

As a Buddhist, I believe that aborted babies are probably the reincarnated souls (actually: their 'clear light'; as the word 'soul' has too many connotations that are unique to Christianity for it be applied to the Tibetan Buddhist conceot of The 'Clear Light') of the worlds many Hitlers, Jeffery Dahlmers, and people who torture other for Religious and/or Politcal Reasons.

If they were particularly awful, they get the 'partial birth' abortion - then they immediately come back as their own teenaged rape-victim mother, only to die from septic death syndrome.

Buddhist know that people who are really terrible will always get what they deserve - and that the 'punnishments' always fit the 'crimes', when it comes time to count ones black and white pebbles; we also know that we know this - or at least I hope that my fellow Buddhist believe those like myself who have some special reason to be so sure of ourselves - life, this shell, this pupae is but one of many that we occupy during the process of becomming.

Thus; Abortion is not so scary after all - at some point, the Spirit within that Fetus chose to be there; if you believe as I do, it probably knew it had it comming to it.

It probably had taken on that incarnation - in a completely self-less effort to help teach it's own would-be mother some important Karmic lesson, that only having an abortion could teach her.

Get over it, Catholic Church! Do you believe that Life ends with Death? No? Then why are you so AFRAID OF IT!

Is it fear of punnishment? Hows that? Didn't Jesus absolve all of your sins?

You always say that when ypou want to get away with somethimg - but when the rest of us dco soemthing that you, the Church, considers a 'sin' then it's all, "JESUS IS GONNA GET YOU - UNLESS YOU DO EXACTLY AS WE SAY!"

Bah!

In my mind, to be pro-life one would have to care about all life. The hypocrisy that all but the hardest core of zealots sees is that conservatives are against anything that helps the Post-Born. They are rabidly pro-war and pro-death penalty. They mock any show of compassion for those less fortunate than themselves and certainly have no qualms about the lives lost by dismantling the social safety net or denying poor children health care, a decent education or proper nutrition, though like a fetus, their situation is not their fault. Its time to quit paying attention to anything so blatantly absurd as the Pro-life movement.

So Margaret Sanger wasn't alone in being a fan of it. Nor was a fondness for eugenics confined to those who favored women's emancipation. But the antichoicers, eager to cover up the fact that bigots and racists currently run riot in their movement and have for decades, try to distract from this fact by pointing out a flaw that Margaret Sanger, who has been dead over forty years and whose salad days were over a century ago, shared with most of her contemporaries round about 1900 or so.

Why bother keep giving these guys credibility when they have already used up years ago what little they had?

Could it be that so-called progressives just don't have any arguments of their own without the back-drop of nuts like these guys and Limbaugh? You all need these boogie men like W needed Osama Bin Laden in order to be considered relevent. And Bin Laden needed W.

You are right that abortion is a gender issue, and the two cannot be decoupled.

Some might compare a pro-life woman to an anti-affirmative action black man like Clarence Thomas. In other words, a darling of the right for dissing their own people, to the pleasure of others. Or, if you like a more extreme example, recall that when voter registrants went to Mississippi in 1964, the governor touted black cotton pickers in the Delta who disclaimed interest in the "agitators" from the north.

Thomas' example is particularly rich because he himself was an active beneficiary of affirmative action, in reverse. It's very unlikely he would have become a Supreme Court justice as a black liberal. He would not have been unique.

There is a problem, however, with this analogy. First, in looking at race relations, you've got a very heavy stone on one hand -- slavery and all its horrors (degradation, beatings, coerced rape) followed by Jim Crow and employment discrimination. On the other hand, you have a comparative feather -- Justice Thomas' concern that black achievers will be stigmitized by affirmative action. This is not to say that affirmative action is the only answer. Rather, that black critics of Justice Thomas have a very legitimate beef in viewing his career.

In the abortion case, let's look for further rocks and feathers. I think killing an unborn child is a very heavy rock. I also think burdening a woman with an unwanted child is a stone, and reasonable people can disagree over whether, and when (if ever) an abortion should be legally permitted. That's why it should be a democratic decision!

The $64,000 question is: why is this decision kept away from the People? I've posted ad nauseum on problems with the Supreme Court's analysis -- problems I think are irrefutable, and fatal to support for Roe v. Wade. The Gallup results are one more ding to it. To accept Roe, one must posit hypothetically that at some point in our history, 2/3 of the People via Congress, and 3/4 of the States, supported legalized abortion and intended to put it in the Constitution -- that's why the Court is now enforcing it. When you look from 2009 backward, you see clearly that was never the case. If the facts don't fit, it's time to quit.

Finally, women can vote. They can do the weighing described above just like a man. It's time to overturn Roe and let people make a reasonable decision on this subject.