[PhatTBoll]

You completely misunderstood my post. My point wasn't that boiling the democratic platform into a simple contradiction was the right way to go. In fact my point is the exact opposite: there are reasons why large groups of people have a set of beliefs that at first glance seem to be contradictory. To his credit, the OP seems to have understood this and made a thoughtful response.

Here is my take:
The immediate outlawing of abortions would be a disaster for much the same reasons that the OP eventually mentioned. However, the advancement of genetics has made very real the possibility of small-scale eugenics. Very soon (and this may well be happening already) parents will be able to have genetic tests done on their unborn children. Are we really comfortable with allowing parents to abort children because they have down's syndrome? MS? The wrong set of genitalia? Blonde hair instead of brown? In a society that recognizes the right to abortion as fundamental, we have some real questions to wrestle with as genetic analysis of unborn children eventually becomes as common as sonograms.