"[the] Bush administration was shortchanging family planning efforts and said that may be causing abortion rates to go up." I wonder if that is true? I'll bet there is far more here than has been written in the article and can conjure up different scenarios to explain it all (much like Hillary did) but still, I wonder what are the real facts?

Its a fact that banning abortion will not stop abortion. There is no debate to that. Its simply a fact. What the Dem's are trying to do is keep them safe by maintaining regulations over them and not pushing them underground like an all out ban would do. Abortions are an incredibly sad reality. They should not exist, ever, but they do. Once people come to that realization, then we could actually progress the topic through education, and not regress through all these back door anti-abortion schemes the President is pushing.

Its a fact that banning abortion will not stop abortion. There is no debate to that. Its simply a fact. What the Dem's are trying to do is keep them safe by maintaining regulations over them and not pushing them underground like an all out ban would do. Abortions are an incredibly sad reality. They should not exist, ever, but they do. Once people come to that realization, then we could actually progress the topic through education, and not regress through all these back door anti-abortion schemes the President is pushing.

True. Banning murder will not stop murders from happening.

But there is a difference between 'justifiable homicide' and killing for sheer convenience.

We can ban one while protecting the other.

Sure, the only two views are: abortion is taking a life, or it is not. But there is a wider range of conclusions that can be made from that dichotomy than just two.
For instance, I think abortion is the taking of a life, but I can't prove it well enough to satisfy the legal definition of 1st degree murder. Thus, while I personally oppose abortion on moral and theological grounds, I do think it is a sin that is between the mother, the child, and God, and nothing we can do on earth can affect her testimony in front of Him. Holding that view, my main priority at this point is try to eliminate any accomplices to the sin and make the choice truly in the mother's hands: no surgical abortions, just medical abortificants that must be taken by the mother's own hand, like RU-486 and the so-called "morning after dosage". The fact that it would put something like a 2- or 3- week limit on the allowable range of abortions is just a nice bonus.
But you won't hear many people advocating my position despite that (I fancy) it is logical, self-consistent, and ensures the accountability for the act rests completely on the mother.

Either you believe that an abortion ends a life or you believe that it is no more than a procedure to remove some excess tissue from a woman's body.

Well, this is silly. I think an abortion ends a life, but I don't think it's a life of a person. I don't consider a fetus to be a person, but it doesn't mean I consider it to be just a bunch of tissue.

I must say, I can't take uncompromising pro-life rhetoric seriously. Saying, "If you don't view abortion the way I do, then you don't value life" is almost like saying, "If George Bush is re-elected, then this is not a democracy". It's a self-righteous wishful thinking approach, that never leads to any results.

I thought my view had calcified to pro-choice.

But for some reason I started seeing the other side a year or two ago.
Is uncompromising rhetoric against infanticide really that difficult to understand?
I am faithless and have no religious objections here. I don't know what a bundle of cells ' is'; the ethics of excising such is not clear to me.

But once that thing looks like a baby, once you have to start cutting what looks like baby parts off in order to remove it, it becomes morally repugnant.
I understand if that seems arbitrary, but there it is.

But once that thing looks like a baby
This is not "uncompromising," and that's how a lot of people feel: when it looks like a baby, abortion is repugnant, and when it doesn't, it's not.

Since people start getting confused, I'll elaborate. What I meant by "uncompromising rhetoric" is "Any abortion is murder, and should be banned"

You can't believe a word that comes out of Hillary's mouth. Just see pages 14, 23, 44, 79, 105, 231 and 249 of any of my books.