Dangerous Waters: The Only Article You Need to Read on Abortion

Jonathan Chait had a really measured piece on an incredibly sensitive subject the other day - Abortion. Let me stand out of the way for most of it:

There's no real resolution to this dispute. Nobody even makes much of an effort to resolve it. Both sides advance arguments that only make sense if you already accept their premise about what a human life is. That's what Perry's doing here. He's saying we should force women to give birth even when they don't want to, because babies born in bad circumstances can be happy anyway. That isn't an acceptable burden to place on women, in my opinion, but it surely is if you think abortion is murder.

Likewise, liberals often call conservatives hypocritical for wanting to shrink government while expanding government's power to ban abortion. Except, if you think abortion is murder, then banning abortion is the sort of thing government ought to be able to do, even if it does very little overall. "Stopping murder" is one function of government that even Grover Norquist would endorse. Anti-abortion conservatives aren't hypocritical, they're (from the pro-choice standpoint) wrong about what a murder is.

The fact is that this is not a resolvable debate - stop attempting to convince the other side. If you believe that life begins at conception, then everything after that is murder. If you believe that life begins at viability, then everything before that is a non-moral choice.

There is NO middle ground. 

The best suggestion I've ever heard was from a professor I had in college for the Philosophy of Medicine. Rather than even arguing about this, we should be aggressively trying to move the age of viability (or the ability to freeze zygotes) as close to zero days as possible. If, for example, you had the ability to extract a zygote (and freeze it for future implantation) that was a mere 1 day since fertilization as easily and safely as you could perform an abortion, then everyone on both sides would agree that would be the correct path.

All energy directed towards anything else ultimately will not swing anyone one way or the other.