Rights and abortion

So have you heard? Sarah Palin isn't very well educated. Liberals are jumping all over this one, but I think slightly unfairly. There is a real constituency of genuine pro-life, pro-privacy conservatives out there, and a smarter one could have articulated this position more clearly. The Constitution doesn't contain the words "abortion" or "privacy", so liberals and conservatives alike spill a lot of ink and burn up a lot of pixels trying to find constitutional grounds for their positions. Some of those conservatives, I suppose, believe that the Constitution doesn't strictly speaking guarantee a right to privacy even if, say, the fourth amendment has the effect of protecting peoples' privacy.

Others believe that it does. For them, it's a hardly unprecedented matter of competing rights. Because they also believe that fetuses are humans and abortion is murder. To them, you have as much right to an abortion as you do to lure a man into the privacy of your home and kill him. It's a perfectly consistent and sensible position... because they're pro-life. Unfortunately for John McCain, he didn't choose a running mate who was capable of articulating the nuance.