''Dean says Democrats losing on abortion''

"In his first visit to Minnesota since becoming the party chairman two months ago, Dean told an audience in Minneapolis on Wednesday night that while his party is right to defend a woman's right to have an abortion, it is wrong to defend the procedure as a moral issue. "I think we need to talk differently about abortion," the blunt-spoken physician and former Vermont governor told several hundred supporters of the Minnesota affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The debate shouldn't be about whether abortion is good or bad, Dean said. It should be about whether a woman has a right to make up her own mind. "We got pushed into a corner by the Republican propaganda machine, forced to debate and defend positions that aren't our positions," he said. "I don't know anybody in America who's pro-abortion." "If I could strike the words 'choice' and 'abortion' out of the lexicon of our party, I would," he said. "The debate and the difference between the parties is we believe a woman has a right to make up her own mind about her health care, and they (Republicans) believe that (House Majority Leader) Tom DeLay and the boys in Congress should be making up that woman's mind." Democrats need to reframe the debate, he said. "The person who frames the issues … wins the debate, and they (Republicans) have been kicking our butt for a long time because we have not framed the issues ourselves."-from the story today in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.