There are many contentious political issues, and they are contentious for lots of reasons. The big one in the news right now is abortion. Personally, I find the debate surrounding the abortion issue to be far more interesting than the issue itself. The debate reveals why the issue is so contentious. It's not simply the nature of the issue itself that is responsible, but the fact that the opposing sides view abortion as a completely different type of issue.
For people who favor legal abortion, abortion is a medical issue. To them, a fetus is not an especially young baby human, but something that is in some way less than that. Viewed from that position, it only makes sense to protect the rights of women to seek whatever medical treatments they deem appropriate, including having non-babies removed from their bodies. I suppose, at the root of it, this makes a fetus a parasite.
People who are against abortion do view a fetus as being an especially young baby human. To them, then, killing it would be a violent crime, and this whole thing doesn't even seem like it should be an issue, because killing baby humans once they're born is definitely illegal, and nobody seems to think we should change that. I suppose at the root of it, these people must believe that genetic lineage is the only definition of humanity, as fetuses lack any of the qualities (self-awareness, opinions, artistic creativity, personality) that make humans people and other kinds of animals non-people. I suppose that for those of us who believe in them, souls are also a meaningful separation between humans and other animals, but I can't claim to know whether fetuses have souls.
I've always thought it would be interesting to argue abortion from a self-defense perspective. After all, it is not always illegal to violently kill humans, even the ones that everybody agrees are people. When a stranger trespasses on a person's private property, and the person reasonably believes that the stranger is a threat to his or her life, the person is justified in killing the stranger by violent means. Abortion can be argued to satisfy all of these conditions. Childbirth is can be dangerous or deadly, and it's hard to think of property any more private than one's own body. Yet, you never hear this argument. I wonder why.
