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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (47418)	1/31/2008 4:10:05 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541936

Rambi - Thank YOU. As we've been discussing here, a big part of the problem is that so many policy debates end up being framed as a black/white choice between two positions, neither of which actually address the fundamental problem. For example, the abortion debate always seems to center on the question of whether a woman has the right to choose to end a pregnancy or not. It's framed as a moral issue. Liberals cast conservatives as wanting the government to control women's bodies, and conservatives say that liberals don't value life. I have even heard conservatives say that liberals "celebrate" the announcement of abortion statistics at rallies. The fact is that nobody considers an abortion to be a desirable event. The basic problem is that there are too many unwanted pregnancies. Reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and the number of abortions would go down. In Sweden, in the 70s, they decided that too many young women were having abortions. So they started a big publicity campaign to promote the use of birth control, and made contraceptives available to everyone over the age of 14. Some conservatives might be horrified by that approach, but the fact is that the number of unwanted pregnancies, and abortions, plummeted. At least they were addressing the actual problem, and not demonizing each other on moral grounds. Other European countries have adopted similar policies. See this site for statistics on abortions and pregnancy rates through 1996: washingtonpost.com Note that there is a good possibility that the U.S. numbers of abortions are underreported. We probably aren't doing quite as well as these figures indicate. I think the Harlem Children's Zone is another good example of that kind of thinking. It's not about making liberals right or conservatives right. It's about addressing the fundamental problems. - Allen