> So few people will ever have abortions in their lives...
1. Few people are killed by cops. Does that mean the issue isn't important?
2. Abortion rates are higher than you probably realize. For example, in NYC over 1/3 of pregnancies are terminated [1]. And that's after it's been getting better. There are on the order of a million abortions every year, depending on how you count. You know a lot of people that have had terminated pregnancies. They just haven't told you about it.
3. Is it fair to be a single issue voter? If your perfect candidate in every other respect also planned to take away the right to vote from Native Americans, could you vote for her? Of course not.
The reason it's a controversial issue is because both sides see it as a human rights issue (like universal suffrage).
pro-choice:
* Women deserve autonomy
* They don't deserved to be punished and have their lives ruined due to mistakes and oversights in birth control
* Women are intelligent and deserve the benefit of the doubt about when abortion is a good choice or not
* Government should support women and their goals in their healthcare, not dictate their lives
pro-life:
* Unborn humans are humans, too, and deserve to be recognized as people with rights
* This is literally a civil rights issue on the order of importance of slavery, suffrage for women, or black civil rights
* Erring on the side of not killing is the right way to balance 'choice' with 'life'
* Bodily autonomy has limits in extreme circumstances (having sex in public, taking illicit drugs, wearing seatbelts)
* The sexism argument is a red herring. Half of children are women, and the most vocal pro-life proponents tend to be women as well.
Additionally, the pro-life side has procedural objections since there was never a democratic process for expanding the right to abortions. I agree with this point, which means I blame the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade for all this animosity.
> If your perfect candidate in every other respect also planned to take away the right to vote from Native Americans, could you vote for her? Of course not.
If there's no reasonable way they could push that pet issue of theirs through (because the rest of Congress would just call them an idiot) then sure, why not?
It's sort of like the think/say distinction ("you can't get in trouble for thinking"), but taken another few notches further: politicans shouldn't really be judged for what they say they'll do, or even what they appear to attempt to do knowing they'll fail—only what they're likely to actually use power granted to them to accomplish.
Most candidates, once in power, are effectively centrists. With presidential candidates, there's the moderating influence of Congress and the Judicial system; but even with individual Congressmen or Senators, once they attain their positions, they're sitting atop a hierarchy of (technocratic) policy advisors that tend to—when all advising in the same direction—override the boss's personal preferences. If all your employees, all your lobbyists, and all the think-tanks say to do X, you're going to do X, even if you (and your "base") would rather do Y. (Which is why we call the thing the President heads the Executive branch: the President isn't much setting policy, they're effectively just executing policy decisions arising from the entirety of the D.C. strategic intelligence community.)
Thus, most candidate positions are postures: things said to signal allegiance to certain voting bases, in full knowledge of the fact that those promises will never (be allowed to) come to pass. Posturing is PR: a big machine which gets set aside when the election is over. And thus, posturing should be ignored—given no weight—when trying to predict the value of electing any given candidate. The candidate's posturing—their PR—has no predictive value on what they'll really accomplish when handed power.
If, on the other hand, you can look below the posturing, and figure out what each candidate will really do with power (which is much harder; it involves a lot of looking at who they have ties with and what promises or deals they've made to get power), then you can actually pick a candidate based on how you want the world to look in the future.
1. Few people are killed by cops. Does that mean the issue isn't important?
2. Abortion rates are higher than you probably realize. For example, in NYC over 1/3 of pregnancies are terminated [1]. And that's after it's been getting better. There are on the order of a million abortions every year, depending on how you count. You know a lot of people that have had terminated pregnancies. They just haven't told you about it.
3. Is it fair to be a single issue voter? If your perfect candidate in every other respect also planned to take away the right to vote from Native Americans, could you vote for her? Of course not.
The reason it's a controversial issue is because both sides see it as a human rights issue (like universal suffrage).
pro-choice:
* Women deserve autonomy
* They don't deserved to be punished and have their lives ruined due to mistakes and oversights in birth control
* Women are intelligent and deserve the benefit of the doubt about when abortion is a good choice or not
* Government should support women and their goals in their healthcare, not dictate their lives
pro-life:
* Unborn humans are humans, too, and deserve to be recognized as people with rights
* This is literally a civil rights issue on the order of importance of slavery, suffrage for women, or black civil rights
* Erring on the side of not killing is the right way to balance 'choice' with 'life'
* Bodily autonomy has limits in extreme circumstances (having sex in public, taking illicit drugs, wearing seatbelts)
* The sexism argument is a red herring. Half of children are women, and the most vocal pro-life proponents tend to be women as well.
Additionally, the pro-life side has procedural objections since there was never a democratic process for expanding the right to abortions. I agree with this point, which means I blame the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade for all this animosity.
[1] http://nypost.com/2014/02/17/abortion-rate-plummets-in-new-y...