An abortion debate hosted yesterday by OurVoice 2008, a group that aims to mobilize young voters, repeatedly broke down into a single vitriolic exchange between the pro-choice and pro-life debaters.
"Why can't we agree on common-sense measures to reduce the need for abortion?" Aubrey Montgomery, an executive of pro-choice organization NARAL asked her pro-life counterparts. "There is a middle ground."
"There isn't!" responded Edel Finnegan, director of a regional Pro-Life Union. "Not with people who are willing to sacrifice the lives of unborn children."
Many of the 25 Penn students in the audience seemed frustrated by this impasse. "It's regrettable," Wharton freshman Anthony Leem said during the event. "I came here looking for a political debate, and I found a moral one."
The debate was the first in a series of "Issues of the Month" debates that OurVoice 2008 will be hosting. They are organized by the group's founder, 2005 Wharton graduate Ryan Comfort, and a team of Management 100 students who created the Web site for OurVoice 2008 as a term project.
One of those students, Wharton freshman Xiaochan Jia, said the goal of these debates is to "break down an issue into parts where the views of each side can be seen very clearly."
Yesterday's debate was split into particular areas of contention, such as "partial-birth abortion" and "parental notification/consent."
But neither side made much effort to restrict their remarks to the subject at hand. Comfort, acting as moderator, frequently interceded to keep the debaters on topic. Audience members often broke into incredulous laughter, and personal accusations briefly flew between the participants.
Debaters were chosen based on written arguments that each submitted to appear next week on OurVoice2008.com.
The impassioned and often personal nature of live debate between those same contributors surprised Comfort. "I really need to process this," he said. "We need to come up with a format that makes it easier to stick to politics."
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