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The problem, as I see it, is that it is impossible to make both sides happy here...
True. That's why we vote. It's an imperfect solution in an imperfect world. The alternative is that we could have someone in power who "knows best" and tell us all how to live. Believe it or not, neither side wants this. In the US, the people tell the government what to believe by consensus, and while that's not a perfect solution, is the best we have available.

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The best answer I have been able to come up with for myself is this: I ask myself, "who is being told they may not do something they wish to do? Is it forcing anyone else to do something they don't want to do?" In the cases above, the answers are "the liberals" and "no".
I'll give you the first, though I think it's more complicated than that, but the abortion question has much more going on and defies such a simplification. I might regret going into it further, but regarding abortion from the conservative perspective:

Who is being told they may not do something they wish do to? the answer is the child, who has a fundamental right to life. Conservative absolutely believe that an abortion is taking away freedom from a defenseless, living human.

Is it forcing anyone else to do something they don't want to do? The argument here could be that a child cannot make the choice for life yet, but then you’d have to extend this for children up to quite a high age, meaning mothers could take their children’s lives up until they were old enough to make that decision for themselves.

Of course, the ultimate question here is who gets to decide whether the unborn are actually living humans who should be protected. This gets back to the question of when society has the right to enforce its morals upon people.

To draw from another ethical question in the past of our country let’s look at slavery. In that case as well there was the question of whether a slave should be regarded as a human worth protecting. Slave owners felt it was their right to decide what they could do with their property, and from their perspective this made sense. If a slave is only property belonging to a person, then the freedom of the owner should not be abridged. Today that argument is ludicrous because we all know the slaves were humans and the "owners" were infringing on their rights as human beings. That the owners at the time believed their slaves were not to be regarded as human (or at least as equal humans) is of no consequence: the slaves were not property and it was wrong to infringe upon their rights. In this case we see not only does society have the right to enforce its values (the slaves are humans and should be protected by the law), but that regardless of what the prevailing attitude of the time was, we can all agree it was wrong. It’s wrong now and it was wrong then.

None of the above addresses the question Doug brought up in another thread about whether a child's life should be terminated to save him or her from a tortured life, but it illustrates that there are times when the government should step in and that some rights trump other's rights. The conservative believe this is such an issue, whereas liberals do not. I don’t know how else you can decide the answer to this question except by allowing the public to vote.
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-Jeff
Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings; they did it by killing all those who opposed them.