Addressing it at the federal level is exactly how you avoid the issues of the Blotto game. There’s exactly one “battlefield” and the results are applied uniformly — no opportunity to split the troops.

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of abortions being available, at least early on. The statistics are something like 2:1 in favor. But there’s enough local variation — especially in rural areas — that by forcing regional votes, you can get a number of places where it’s voted down.

I agree, but you’re making the wrong complaint — the pattern of abortion under the current abortion laws are pretty close to what studies show people really want. Abortions overwhelmingly occur in the early stages of pregnancy, and late stage abortions are usually medically necessary. So the current laws are just fine — the problem is that we’ve got a bunch of hyper-conservative religious nuts out there who insist that we need to change the laws to suit their superstitions.

So, yes — we’ve got better things to to. But it’s not the Federal government that’s trying to focus attention on abortion.

Gay marriage is a different story — I disagree that it’s a triviality. It’s no more trivial than women’s suffrage, or ending laws against interracial marriage. There are considerably more gays in the US than, say, Jews, and most people would consider it an outrage if Jews weren’t allowed to marry.

I think it goes to the heart of the American notions of freedom and equality. We’ve got a class of people for whom even some very basic notions of equality don’t apply — this is a great wrong, and it’s important to address it. I have little doubt that in a couple of decades, we’ll be looking back on today with the same kind of embarrassment that we feel today when we look at this.

I think it’s completely irrelevant. Eugenics is generally not “ultra-late term abortion” — it’s really about breeding. Choosing the “right” breeding pairs to improve offspring. It’s also usually a bad idea — it gets in the way of so many other basic freedoms. On the other hand, it is, technically speaking, a form of eugenics that we already practice in requiring couples to have blood tests before marriage to warn about certain complications. It’s technically eugenics at work when parents discourage their children from marrying outside their race or religion. Some forms of breeding control between humans are seen as perfectly ordinary. It’s a centralized form of eugenics enforced by law that’s abhorrent, not eugenics per se.

The thing to note in the supposed connection between abortion and crime rates is that nobody is forcing these women to abort. They know they’re in no position to do a proper job raising a child, and they take a very reasonable and sensible step on their own. It’s nothing to do with any notions of eugenics.

Certainly I’d advocate making it easier for them to avoid pregnancy in the first place, too — education, easy availability of contraception, and so on.