> I just listened to an R and D both wildly misconstrue the abortion issue as if one side wanted to murder children and the other wanted to control women’s bodies.
Only one side of this is, in fact, being misconstrued, as is evident by the recent deaths of women in states with abortion bans:
"Up until around 32 weeks," and not all with medical diagnoses. And this is under current law. Can you say that everyone should be completely comfortable with this?
If a given abortion is in fact murder, and I have some power to stop it (through politics or otherwise,) I feel uncomfortable inasmuch as I am allowing murder, and I feel it ethically necessary to resolve the discomfort. This moral consideration does of course balance against many others, including the preventable deaths of mothers that the OP highlighted.
Looking from outside of US its quite confusing how society of the free the country of libertarians… even makes this debatable. Its quite literally commanding someone what they can or cannot do about their body.
Looking at this from outside the US, it is quite bizarre to see how 2 extreme positions dominate the abortion debate there. Ultimately, the question is at which point the embryo should be considered a human being, who's life deserves some form of legal protection. One extreme position is that there should be no legal protection at all until birth. The other extreme would be granting full legal protection from conception. Both positions are fringe positions in Western Europe. The way the debate is radicalized in the US as a mater of fundamental human rights, feels like it leaves little space for the kind of compromise that most Europeans would accept as the only sensible position.
Abortion is the ultimate debate; with no clear answer from any biological, moral, legal, ethical, philosophical, or even religious clause, and science leaning the "wrong" direction depending on social "norms".
Social norms are friction against the ability to be honest with peers - that are nearly all going to be incentived to lie about their actual opinion, and project the opposite (but vote the way they are told anyway)
Only one side of this is, in fact, being misconstrued, as is evident by the recent deaths of women in states with abortion bans:
https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-ambe...
False balance is its own form of fallacious thinking.