Now how do you deal with reality if you make abortion illegal. History has shown that if it’s illegal people will still seek abortion but what happens is you have back alley abortions leading to serious complications and death. You have to either go after the doctors or the mothers. Neither is a viable solution. The debate comes down to irrational people wanting a utopia that fits their ideological idea of what utopia is. Unfortunately this is the real world and issues like this can’t be solved with wishing and wanting. Abortion is not the problem even though many want to focus on it because showing dead babies and preaching is so much more “exciting”, it’s the lack of education and responsibility.

Make them answer the question of “If you get your way and make abortion illegal then what?” You can’t force people to follow laws like that so does making it illegal really do anything other than giving prolife activists a warm fuzzy feeling about winning their little culture war.

Issues like these are non-issues used to keep their base fired up about something, nothing more.

Excellent conversation. People should be held accountable not only for the consequences of their actions, but the logical consequences of their arguments. Thank you for trying to get beyond the inflammatory rhetoric of the right wing. Countering with progressive inflammatory rhetoric is no solution. As you have shown, a solution is to calmly lay out the points of an argument in a jargon-free manner. Whenever I hear Rush or Wilkow (I live in the Capital Region) start out an argument with “…those liberal/elite/drive-by media…” I know the playing field is already slanted. Wouldn’t you categorize someone who can afford a private plane to the Dominican Republic for the weekend as “elite”?

I also don’t like how the right-wing projects its own weaknesses onto progressives. Just because dittoheads march in lockstep doesn’t mean that progressives are slaves to Kos or Arianna or even Mike from Albany!