Obama’s nuance, and it is nuance, is shared by the majority of citizens across party lines. That is why both parties are able to straddle and never resolve the issue one way or the other.

As with state sanctioned murder and murder in self-defense, most people can recognize a moral violation sometimes is still the preferable alternative. The solution to abortion is not to drive it into a criminal underground. It is rather to make every effort to assure it was never needed in the first place.

I recommend the MST as self-exploration:
http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/eric1/test/testN.html

Remember the questions are not asking, would you do A or B. Instead they simply ask, which is more purely objectively moral.

Society occasionally must sanction immoral action and that point is when we need our Justice system to weigh the circumstances of the violation.

Anti-Abortion is a nonsensical political position.

1) We have interests, even grave interests, other than abortion.
2) We have interests in the Supreme Court other than how a judge will rule on a case reversing Roe.
3) The day after Roe is reversed, almost all states will make abortion a civil right.
4) Absent public support for ending legal abortion, any laws or rulings that end abortion will only do so temporarily.
5) There are popular items we can pursue to limit abortion that do enjoy wide public support. They should be pursued.

Also, I think I am owed five tacos.

1. Sperm and unfertilized eggs are just as alive as a fertilized egg. There is no constitutional basis for assigning personhood to the last but not the former. Nor, for that matter, is there a biblical one. In fact, the 14th amendment to the Constitution on its face requires a person to be born.

2. A constitutional amendment to assign personhood to a single-cell fertilized egg would certainly fail, once the public understood that the consequences of that decision would be to prohibit all abortions except when continuing the pregnancy would likely kill the mother, most IVF and all embryonic stem-cell research.

3. Overturning Roe would likely launch a cultural war that conservatives would lose.

4. There is nothing small-government about the current pro-life movement.

5. The party that’s trying to reduce unwanted pregnancies, unintended miscarriages and early deaths from curable diseases is the Democrats.

Kmiec wrote about the GOP’s failure to do anything other than generate heat over the issue, and wrote off the idea of gaining the “fifth vote” to overturn Roe. Now, you can claim that it’ll be different this term, and I think that’s a reasonable argument. But it’s hard for me to see why, if you care about the number of abortions performed in this a country with little appetite for Palin-like maximalist pro-life policies, Kmiec’s arguments warrant the condescension and contempt that Douthat offers.

No, it does not make sense for pro-lifers to support the other party on pro-life issues, but that is not the point. The point is that the demonstrable (nay, blindingly obvious) failure of the GOP to accomplish anything on abortion — which shows us that the party has zero commitment to the issue — removes the abortion issue from the equation. It is all well and good to refuse to support pro-abortion candidates (I suppose it makes one feel better about oneself), but the fact that, in the political arena, abortion is a lost cause and the pro-life cause has no real champions means that it is self-defeating to allow the abortion issue to control one’s political choices.

Now, even after abortion is removed from the equation, it is questionable for a conservative to support someone as liberal as Senator Obama. However (for me at least), the failure of the Bush administration, and the GOP generally, to display any loyalty whatever to genuine conservative principles also removes loyalty to conservatism from the political equation. Let’s face it, the GOP did not present us with a recognizably conservative candidate in this election.

So, if no conservative candidate was available, and no pro-life candidate was available, what basis was left on which to choose how to vote? I submit that the need to punish Bush and the Republicans for abandoning the pro-life cause, and for betraying conservatism and the Constitution, became the overriding consideration. And only a vote for Obama — not a conscience-salving vote for a third party or abstention — would contribute to that punishment.