The fundamentalists of the Religious Right (and their political lapdogs, the Conservatives) have succeeded in falsely framing the Pro-Choice/Prol-Life debate to stack the deck in their favor. What they have done is set two incorrect extremes—or should I say one incorrect extreme.

On the one hand, the religious fundamentalists of American society want to abolish every woman's choice in the matter of reproduction by outlawing abortion. Although they reluctantly cave in to exceptions to lull others into a false sense of security, their goal is no abortions, period. They frame thier opponents at the other end of the ideological spectrum as wanting to allow a woman the choice, if she so chooses, to terminate a pregnancy.

However, the opposite of the state outlawing abortion in any instance is the state endorsing abortion in every instance. View the spectrum like this:

Hmm. See, what the religious fundamentalists have done is set the middle as the extreme, so that any compromise must start from the middle and proceed toward their end. The reason their opponents don't start from the other extreme is that, unlike the fundamentalists, they are not lunatics and would never advocate such a ridiculous notion.

Unfortunately when reasonable people try to compromise with extremists, the reasonable people are starting from a reasonable perspective already. So the only compromise must be something between reasonable and crazy. Ideally, the compromise that would work best is one between the two extremes shown above, which would meet in a very reasonable center. On the other hand, crazy groups on both extremes would probably never compromise at all. That's why it is that reasonable, intelligent and thinking people are always at a disadvantage when it comes to dealing with religious fundamentalist conservatives.