Abortion "Rhetoric": A Response to Steve S.

In response to my Abortion “Rhetoric” post, Steve S. asked me via email to address his post, to which Eduardo refers in a recent post.  I’ll respond to Steve here and Eduardo later.  Steve’s post concerns “what most citizens believe” about abortion.  “What most citizens believe” is clearly relevant to the political landscape, but I guess I don’t see its relevance to the truth of the matter asserted, to wit, abortion is the brutal and intentional taking of innocent human life.  Is this claim true or not?  In an earlier time, we might have asked is the world round or not.  The fact that most residents of

Europe

may have believed it flat doesn’t change the truth of the proposition.  In the nineteenth century (maybe even into the mid-20^th century), most citizens probably thought that blacks were not equal to whites.  These beliefs hampered political efforts moving toward equality, but the beliefs didn’t change the truth of the proposition.  The prudential question, I think is this:  when a citizenry’s beliefs are out of sync with reality, is it better to tell them the truth even at the risk of angering them, or is it better to shade the truth and bring them along to the truth more slowly?  However this question is answered, it still doesn’t change the fact that abortion is the act of intentionally killing an innocent human being.