Obama and Abortion

A friend recently wrote:

This election ignore all the lies about obama is a terrorist, or obama is anti christ, or obama will destroy the u.s. those things are ridiculous and they are gonna continue to go out of conrtol. but here's one thing that is true and is equally as disturbing:

In a failed abortion situation, when the baby survives, the question is what do you do with that baby? The united states congress voted on this and there was a general consensus that it was wrong to just let that baby die. However, Obama did not feel the same way. He voted for letting the baby die. Hillary Clinton voted to let the baby live. This is not propaganda, google this, I'll even give you what Obama said to defend his side:

"that we live in a pluralistic society, and that I can't impose my religious views on another."
-Obama

Its not a matter of religion, it's a matter of the right to life, the most important right in America. Some people will argue in the case where a baby will harm the health of the mother that the abortion is fair. But in a failed abortion the baby is outside of the mother and if everyone shared Obama's view they just let the baby lay out to die.

This is an extremely ugly and graphic topic, but I think its necessary to hear. Maybe McCain is old, pretty boring, and just kind of a weird guy, but he at least has never in his 200 years of congress life voted against life.

If you don't like either just do what I'm doing write in Ron Paul.

Ron Paul: Youtube him

As a HuffPo article (of course, sympathetic to Obama) points out (link), my friend's summary gets some of the facts wrong (e.g., Obama's vote was in the Illinois senate not the US senate and there are reasons other than a disregard for life that may have prompted Obama to vote against the Illinois bill).  That's not to say that Obama's position/votes related to abortion don't bother me.

Regardless, I see in this appeal from my friend (and most conversation about abortion) a perpetuation of the focus on ideology rather than practicality.  The American public is pretty evenly divided between the view that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare and that it should be illegal and rare. Ideologically those two views are very different, but practically they are very similar. Both parties focus on ideology as a wedge issue, dig in to give no ground, and as a result do things that don't help.  Rather than focus on ideological differences, an approach that has led to stalemate with little hope for significant change in the foreseeable future, I'm more interested in both sides focusing on where they agree and can work together to do practical things to reduce the abortion rate.

Some examples are suggested in an article by Tony Campolo: Pro-Life Democrats Call for an Abortion Reduction Plank