Roe v. Wade versus Roe v. Wade (tic tic tic...)

No other domestic political issue has been more divisive during the last thirty years than the issue of abortion. And over the years the two opposing sides have allowed their stridence to coalesce into absolutist positions with the radical core of abortion rights proponents fighting any imaginable restriction and tacitly supporting a position of abortion until birth, and the radical pro-life core of the pro-life movement rending their garments over harvesting stem cells from abandoned polyzygotes "living" in fertility clinic freezers. And still, poll after poll demonstrates that roughly 70% of Americans favor abortion rights with restrictions.

The Liberal Capitalist Party believes that the time has come for a political party to take up the banner beneath which most Americans already march, and articulate a morally rational, politically workable compromise position.

 In order to do so, the first thing that needs to be addressed is the current law of the land, the US Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade. Current pro-life orthodoxy considers this ruling at best to be modern day Dred Scott decision, ripping the right to be alive from the unborn. On the other side of the fence we have pro-choice advocates treating Roe as if it were the Ark of the Covenant, the loss of which can only result in the destruction of the promised land. The whole truth of course isn't to be found in either extreme.

 The pro-life side needs to recognize that even though the ruling is generally correctly viewed as an example of unjustified judicial activism, it's beside the point. Women essentially have and have always had the power to have an abortion, regardless of this or any other ruling, and overturning it will move this nation absolutely no closer to stopping even a single abortion, especially as we pass into the age of safe and effective (for the mother) abortion drugs. For any politcal movement that holds less actual abortion as its goal, Roe is simply yesterday's battle.

The pro-choice side, on the other hand, needs to understand that Roe's findings aren't what they think they are in regards to women's rights. The ruling in fact contains the seeds of its own destruction by basing the permissability of abortion solely on the viability of the fetus. Notice how there is no mention of pregnant women at all in this premise? 

Although the medical technology is currently beyond our grasp, I don't think any of us would have any difficulty imagining a near-future where real test-tube babies can be conceived and brought to "term" without ever seeing the inside of a uterus. And from the second that becomes possible, abortion will be completely illegal as per Roe v. Wade, since all fetuses at every stage of development will then be theoretically "viable." 

 America, we have a problem. If we think the current debate over abortion has been socially corrosive, just wait until Roe hits the fan.