Justice Antonin Scalia may have charmed the robes off his colleagues and 60 Minutes, but he was not truthful in explaining his position on abortion.

Two winners in the first two contests, one from each party, have used abortion to rally their base. But progressives who stand on principle, and don't cower in fear, can win the sexual and reproductive health debate by framing abortion properly.

Last week, Senator Joe Lieberman (CT) was asked by a New York Times reporter what he thought of Michael Schiavo, husband of the late Terri Schiavo, campaigning for Ned Lamont. Lieberman replied, it was time “for politicians to let Terri Schiavo rest in peace.” It was as callous as his suggestion that a rape victim be turned down for emergency contraception, despite the defense of Senator Boxer (CA) that Sen. Lieberman was misunderstood.

Speechless. It left me speechless when I read that, remembering that Lieberman could not stop talking about Mrs. Schiavo when his ideology blinded him to the reality of her medical condition, and kept him on every talk show seemingly nonstop discussing her case.

In health care, the ideological quagmire surrounding conscience gets deeper with each forward step. Unprecedented changes in medicine are creating a crisis in conscience at many levels, both in terms of technological and scientific advances, and in terms of the ethical pressure placed on a system that is failing economically at every level.

Today's health care system makes a clear conscience a challenge for many, no matter what you believe.

So when it comes to conscience clauses, I have to ask, should this really be the issue that it has become?

Jailing doctors who work within the law is a recurring theme in the Bush Administration. So far their efforts in this regard have wasted tax payer's time and money on these crusades, and put some compassionate doctors in jail disrupting their families, professions and their patient's care. Karl Zinsmeister, newly appointed Chief of Domestic Policy to President Bush, said last week that he supported policies that would throw doctors who preform abortions in jail, as reported on The Raw Story and originally on PBS.

Its no surprise that the Bush Adminstration would go to such extremes, they have a clearly stated policy opposing safe and legal abortions and have chosen prohibition as the path, as opposed to prevention.

This Memorial Day we remember 25 million souls lost to 25 years of AIDS. Motivated by the death of the love of my early life in 1996 from AIDS, I started thinking about death politically. Carl died just months before medications the developed world takes for granted became available, and months after the US Navy denied him compassionate access to those meds after a five-year study in which he participated. Months meant the difference in him seeing his two sons grow up and our lives continuing together.

In 1997, I began a journey working with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Law, culminating early this year in the US Supreme Court affirming Oregon’s law 6-3: the federal government had no right to interfere in a doctor or pharmacist’s compassionate decision to alleviate suffering at the request of the patient. Strict safeguards make that once controversial law a model of compromise among medical, legal, political, ethics, policy, mental health, faith, hospice, and most importantly, patient and family communities. Compromise works.