Tough Question on Abortion
I'm not a big fan of Chris Matthews, but he raised two arguments on the Laura Ingraham show this morning that I found very interesting.
Matthews admitted that the Democrats don't have a majority of the country behind them. But then he posed the question--would we compromise our positions to get to 51%? So why should we expect the Democrats to do so?
I have an answer to that one, but I'd love to hear from you folks first, so I'll post it in a follow-up to this post.
The second argument was very tough, and I'll admit I don't have an answer for it. On the issue of abortion, Matthews pointed out that if we really think it's murder, are we willing to punish the women with anything like the sentence we dole out for murder, and if not, why?
Laura said something about how the women were victims too, which did not seem convincing. Of course, some may be victims of rape or incest, but I suspect that the vast majority of women seeking abortions do not fall into that category.
I'm definitely not saying that I would put a woman in jail for life for an abortion. But what is the logic of that position? If a life is a life, then why should she not get life? We do seem to have quite a bit of tolerance even for infant-killing among mothers, who seldom get more than a few years except in the sensational cases. But it's still a couple of years. What should be the punishment if abortion were made illegal?
