Jill Lepore laments it:
It’s not that matters of life and death weren’t the subject of fierce political debate before [the 1960s and '70s], but in those years, the two-party system re-aligned itself around these issues, which is horrible, because, while there are only two parties, matters of life and death don’t generally have only two sides. Making these matters partisan makes them impossible to resolve, or even to talk about in any humane way.
Over the last four or five decades, a great deal of political discourse has been reduced to a ham-fisted rhetoric of freedom and murder. It’s as if there are only two possible issues and only two possible positions: Either abortion is freedom and guns are murder, or guns are freedom and abortion is murder. None of these issues and positions existed, in exactly this form, before 1968. I find that strangely comforting. Because something that has a beginning has also got an end.
The Dish 