(Apart from the fact that taxing abortions would discourage poor people from aborting more than it would rich people, which is not exactly what most people would want -- unless the tax scales with the woman's income, but that would just give Yet Another incentive for people to underreport their incomes) maybe that just doesn't occur to people? Seriously, some of these homo hypocritus discussions badly fail Hanlon's Razor (i.e. forget that 84% of the population has IQs below 115, or forget the way people with IQs below 115 think). My grandpa complains if I keep too many lights on when I'm at his place, but he has incandescent bulbs rather than fluorescent ones; does this mean he's lying about his concern about how much he spends on electricity? Maybe Hanson would say he is and could concoct some explanation of why he would he want do that, but I honestly can't.
I agree that a tax doesn't occur to most people. Nor does any other solution. That's exactly what I'm saying is suspicious - it looks very much like motivated stopping. And more than that - if you do propose a tax on abortion, or public shaming for those who commit abortion, or any other intermediate step, these people concoct special pleading reasons to be against it.
If you claim to believe that something is immoral, but you are not interested in preventing it and react against any proposal that might, then I think the simplest conclusion is that you don'...
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.