Young Levi Does the Bristol Stomp. What's At Stake in '08. Jacoby Gets It Right (sort of).

Jeff Jacoby, writing in the Boston Globe today, says, "Ambiguities may muddle the 2008 campaign, but not when it comes to abortion. The next president and vice president will be the most pro-choice in US history. Or the most pro-life."

Although we fall on differing sides of the debate, Jacoby clearly states something we all must remember as we head into the home stretch toward November:

The upcoming election will be - and ought to be - the mother of all abortion rights battles. Enough finagling and finessing, enough prevaricating and posturing. The candidates are either "fer it or agin' it," and the consequences of our choice will ring throughout the nation for generations to come.

Let's begin by being clear about one thing the Right would just as soon forget:

Abortions happen.

Legal or illegal, safe or dangerous, throughout recorded history women have always, and will always, seek abortions. And by the way, when Republicans get into office, abortion rates skyrocket. It's true. Look it up.

Abortions will happen, and gambling will happen, and drug use will happen, and gay affairs in bathrooms at airports will happen, and all the social ills your pastor warns you to avoid will keep on keepin' on. They are as human as greed, gluttony, or karaoke (unfortunately). The salient question is whether we deal with them as adults in a real world, minimizing their ill effects on society, or as make-believe players who think (for example) that somehow teaching nothing at all about sex will keep youngsters like Bristol Palin from getting knocked up.

(By the way, the rich will always be able to get safe abortions. If you think a McCain, Bush, or Kennedy will ever see the bent side of a wire hanger, you know as little about America as you do about human nature. It's the rest of our daughters, sisters, girlfriends and wives we need to worry about.)

Regardless of the Conservatives' self-proclaimed "compassion," don't expect exceptions for victims of rape or incest if McCain and Palin emerge victorious. If abortion is murder, it's murder. Period. A baby from incest at age eleven is no different than one lovingly conceived on a virginal bride's wedding night.

To confuse matters further, both John McCain and Sarah Palin support the death penalty. So much for the sanctity of human life.

An Obama administration will reverse the erosion of women's rights the so-called "pro-life" faction has achieved since the Christian Right infiltrated American politics in the eighties. He will, through legislation and Supreme Court appointments, cement the rights to clean and competent medical care women fought for and gained over the past century in terms of how they deal with unwanted pregnancy.

A McCain administration will strip those protections away, change the course of women's reproductive health, and send thousands of women and girls into a retrograde history-book nightmare of back alleys and illegal abortion mills when they want or need to end a pregnancy.

Banning abortion is a deceptively simple ideological fix for a very complex, real-world problem.

From the Levees of New Orleans to the Levis of Wasilla, reality punctures ideology every time.