But no one on this thread is defending abortion.
No one but you. When you declare again and again that abortion must remain legal despite what the people want or what the Constitution says, then you are defending abortion.
The issue is whether the state, at the behest of "Christians" like yourself, should determine whether a woman will bear a child, or whether the woman should decide for herself.
Nope. The question is whether the people of State (with Christians representing but a small minority) have the right to determine their own laws when it comes to abortion, just as they do with everything else. (See: shoplifting, running red lights, hitting people over the head with baseball bats, shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater, taxing the sale of newspapers, awarding State scholarship money to attend private religious institutions, etc.)
btw, the woman has already made her decision. She willfully chose to engage in the activity which caused her pregnancy.
With everything else in life, actions have consequences. If we could only abort jail sentences after we get caught robbing banks. Or abort our houses burning down after we failed to replace faulty wiring. Or abort the need for a lung transplant because the ones we have now are rife with cancer from years of smoking cigarettes.
If they had only warned us that smoking causes cancer. Or that having unprotected sex causes cancer.
Not all of us here, not even all of us who believe in Christ, think that as conservatives it is the role of the state to enforce Biblical morality.
Conservatives believe the role of a State is to do what the people want, which is why we have State legislatures. Go figure.
Contrast that with your view that the State doesn't get a choice in the matter, but must accept the tyranny you dish out without regard to any written law.
Incidentally, what is your view on laws against stealing?
Rather, that task is best performed by individuals speaking with and helping other individuals, empathic to the circumstances in which women find themselves, facing the fear and anguish of spending the next 20 years of their lives raising a child alone without the financial and emotional means to do so.
Let me see if I got this right. You deny the voice of the people in shaping society through representative government. Yet you have the effrontery to tell us that we need to voice our views to others? Do you have any idea how stupid that sounds?
I feel quite safe in saying that is not the attitude that Christ would have
Based on what?