"Decades of being able to point to 'Roe v. Wade' and declare the matter settled has made the left ideologically complacent and unable to defend the philosophical basis of their stand on abortion"

"The abortion debate is America’s great testing ground for the theory that you can win an argument, not on its actual merits, but merely by manipulating the language to 'frame' the issue in your favour. So the defenders of abortion don’t call themselves anything so crude as defenders of abortion. They call themselves 'pro-choice,' because who wants to be against choice? And the opponents of abortion call themselves 'pro-life,' because who wants to be against life?
    "... Decades of being able to point to 'Roe v. Wade' and declare the matter settled has made the left ideologically complacent and unable to defend the philosophical basis of their stand on abortion ... [yet] abortion is an issue that uniquely calls upon a deep philosophical perspective.... the abortion issue won’t let you get away with vague invocations of 'freedom.' It requires that you have a specific philosophical view on what is the source of individual rights.... [yet] in a way, both sides have abandoned the field of proper philosophical argument, on an issue that really requires it.
    "It is important to fill that gap, to know where we stand philosophically, and to clearly define our principles, because this debate is just getting started....
    "Put simply, if you think rights are granted by society, as the left does, that leads to one particular view of abortion. If you think that rights are given to us by God, that tends to support a different view. And if you believe that rights have a secular, non-collectivist foundation, as I do, that leads to yet another approach to the question ... a third possibility: that they come from nature...."

          ~ Robert Tracinski, from his 2013 article 'The Philosophy of Gosnell'