"One of the most contentious issues in our public life..."

"One of the most contentious issues in our public life over the past three and a half decades has been abortion.  As a physician, and in particular as an obstetrician who has delivered over 4,000 babies, I have always had a special interest in the subject of abortion.  When I studied medicine at Duke Medical School from 1957 to 1961, the subject was never raised.  By the time of my medical residency at the University of Pittsburgh in the mid-1960s, though, wholesale defiance of the laws against abortion was taking place in various parts of the country, including my own.

Residents were encouraged to visit various operating rooms in order to observe the procedures that were being done.  One day I walked into an operating room without knowing what I was walking into, and the doctors were in the middle of performing a C-section.  It was actually an abortion by hysterotomy.  The woman was probably six months along in her pregnancy, and the child she was carrying weighed over two pounds.  At that time doctors were not especially sophisticated, for lack of a better term, when it came to killing the baby prior to delivery, so they went ahead with the delivery and put the baby in a bucket in the corner of the room.  The baby tried to breathe, and tried to cry, and everyone in the room pretended the baby wasn't there.  I was deeply shaken by this experience, and it hit me at that moment just how important the life issue was.
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The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution.  ...  the issue would revert to the states, where it constitutionally belongs. 
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To those who argue that we cannot allow the states to make decisions on abortion since some will make the wrong ones, I reply that this is an excellent argument for world government- for how can we allow individual countries to decide on abortion or other moral issues, if some may make the wrong decisions?  Yes the dangers of a world government surely speak for themselves. 

Let us therefore adopt the constitutional position, one that is achievable and can yield good results but that shuns the utopian idea that all evil can be eradicated.  The Founding Fathers' approach will not solve all problems, and it will not be perfect.  But anyone expecting perfection in this world is going to be consistently disappointed."  Pages 58-61 of The Revolution, A Manifesto