John,

I actually agree with your second paragraph as being a fair description of the current compromis on abortion.

BTW, both you and Samuel are correct in scratching your head over the “Choice as pragmatic compromise” sentence. It was very poorly worded on my part. I was thinking of my earlier sentence, “I would prefer a girl not get an abortion, but…” when I said it.

What I was trying to drive at is that the balance arrived at between the two poles of the debate was that while, in a perfect world people preferred woman not to have abortions, they did accept that there were circumstances where abortion was an acceptible option for pragmatic reasons.

From the debates and articles I’ve seen, and I tend to avoid the now ancient and tedious abortion debate as much as possible, I find your assertation that people don’t know about late term abortions and parental notifications to be a bit suspect to saty the least.