However, the sense in which taboo was used implied that it was something that people shouldn't talk about, and the more I thought about it, the more appealing I found the idea of a temporary ban on abortion in political discourse. Honestly, the subject is a distraction, and discussing it is sometimes profoundly counterproductive. The Republicans, for example, tried to use the threat of a government shutdown to cut federal funding for abortion (and, incidentally, all the free Planned Parenthood condoms that kept me from being a father in college).
Typically, the argument is framed as a moral argument about the dignity and worth of human life. I've noticed that this hasn't stopped anyone from advocating war, and the same people who are "Pro-Life" successfully cut human aid programs that kept babies from dying of things like diarrhea and malnutrition. How many people starve to death while the good folks in the Bible Belt eat their fat asses into a heart attack?
I think that we can safely say that the issue isn't that we value human life. Rather, it seems that abortion evolved from the moral condemnation of "loose women" who had to do those sorts of things into an issue that is tied to personal and cultural identity, to a sort of thoughtless self-righteousness, and because it's an emotional issue tied to the sense of self, it gets used as leverage to push through policies that aren't in anyone's self interest, except politicians, lobbyists, and corporations.
It seems like there are probably more important things to worry about than a drop of dead babies in the ocean of babies who who die around the world.
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