Yesterday in Salon, read "How to think about abortion" by Frances Kisserling on her reflections from the October Open Hearts, Open Minds and Fair Minded Words conference at Princeton.
She covers the water front on how both sides seem to think about the issue and I think everyone was heard, however it seems that there is much yet unsaid and very much yet undone.
The challenge I have for both sides is to support an economic plan that makes abortion unnecessary, with the key feature being a living wage of $1000 per month per child paid from tax credits but with wages - with half the credit from the federal side and half from the state. Such a credit could replace the mortgage interest deduction but would still lead to more housing, since this is what growing families spend most of their additional money on. The credit could also replace most other income support entitlements for families, allowing a serious reduction in the social welfare bureaucracy. Indeed, the only parts that should remain are subsidized health care (which may be mooted by an eventual move to single-payer) and remedial adult-literacy education - which students should be paid to attend (receiving the associated tax credits as if they were working) and the education provider serving as paymaster.
I suspect most of the resistance to this will be on the pro-life side, since being socially conservative usually carries with it economic conservatism - although not always. This is all the more reason to raise the issue, which would also challenge Democrats who want abortion to be safe, legal and rare.
The pro-life side must also be taken to task for their focus on the moral rights of the fetus and their failure to actually propose legislation which takes the status quo into account. Since they propose change, it is up to them to deal with the legal rights questions, both how to grant them without overturning Roe judicially (which would damage all equal protection law) while at the same time preventing tort actions that would lead to the denial of medicare to all women and children in the first trimester, as well as preventing the investigative arm of the state from questioning women who have had a miscarriage. Doing this in law while granting legal rights in the first trimester (or even the first 20 weeks) is not as easy as it sounds - indeed, it is probably impossible. The pro-choice side needs to make the power of the state the focus, or it will continue to face an onslaught from activists and pulpits on this issue, with the related electoral demagoguery.