A lot of these posters don't seem to realize the urgency involved in having to take care of a pregnancy now, regardless of what methods are used.

Some don't seem to realize that lack of access to the suction and curettage method will also tend to indicate lack of access to RU486 and other abortifacients too, this lack of access brought to you by powerful pro-life groups and a totally insensible president. A desperate woman will try anything.

We have here a perfect storm in this country: a crashing economy that would tend to be an entirely hostile place to raise a child, where monies for well baby and pre natal checkups is becoming harder and harder to find, and where the cost for food is through the roof. Oh, and how many people without health insurance in this country now? I think they admit to about 55 million.

In addition to this horrendous economy, the blocking and the stopping of sex education, free birth control, and access to safe abortion. What a horrendous violence if being committed on the American public at this time!

Meanwhile, on a global level, crop production is being stymied by the highly erratic weather, and access to potable water a problem in more and more places around the world. The world population is at a dangerous high - it couldn't be more evident that birth rates have to be curbed NOW. Yet we have the US gov't. trying to stop access to birth control and abortion in India, Africa and other places! Our holy rolling anti-abortion anti-birth control friends are either stupid, retarded, or would like to see the world come crashing down, I guess. It is a grim situation and I have no idea how we are going to get out of this as a planet.

Here in the US, for the past two years, I have been predicting the resurrection of JANE - they are forcing us to go underground again. For more than political, for more than personal reasons, we should hail these developments. We should be exporting this knowledge to our friends across the water - they need it too! It comes down to saving the world.

@Bonnie Lee Fox

The issue as to what kind of criminal penalties women seeking abortion would face came up in the 1988 presidential debate between Bush Sr. and Michael Dukakis. Bush said there would be penalties, but couldn't say what they would be, and Dukakis seized on Bush's moment of weakness. The Bush campaign later issued a statement saying abortionists would be penalized, and not the women seeking abortion.

I made this point in correspondence in 1990 to my friend Ann Muir Thomas, a pro-choice feminist, and it's a point I've made again in my 2006 book, The Liberal Case Against Abortion: The majority of pro-life activists also regard the mother seeking abortion as a victim and not a criminal. Looking back on over 200 years of legal history, the American Center for Bioethics concluded that women have never been prosecuted for abortion; only the abortionists. This is analogous to our current laws which arrest drug dealers and prostitutes rather than their clientele. If we continue to imperfectly enforce laws like these against what are arguably victimless crimes, why can't we take steps towards protecting the unborn?

In the case of prostitution, sometimes police do arrest the "johns", so perhaps the drug dealer analogy is more accurate. A November 4, 2002 Time/CNN poll found that 82 percent of those polled felt marijuana should be legal only for medicinal purposes. 72 percent felt recreational users should get fines rather than jail time, which is essentially decriminalization. The complete legalization of marijuana was favored by only 34 percent of respondents, but this figure is twice as large as it was in 1986. According to a 2003 Zogby poll, two of every five Americans say "the government should treat marijuana the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control it, tax it, and only make it illegal for children."

I'm not trying to change the subject from abortion to marijuana, but am merely saying that drug use arguably is victimless, yet we criminalize it anyway. There's no reason we can't do the same with abortion, which is arguably the taking of a human life.

As for the argument that if abortion is murder, and the unborn child's life has the same value as one already born, then women seeking abortions (and not the abortionists) must be given the death penalty or life imprisonment...I'll be the first to admit, there are no easy answers here. Look at what happened to Andrea Yates. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She was regarded as a victim, not a criminal.

There may be some truth to your assertion that we do not presently place the same value on the unborn as we do on the born, which is why I say penalizing abortionists would be "taking steps towards protecting the unborn." It may not be assigning the unborn the same value we give to the born, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction.

Number one...it's sad that this extremely important issue has only generated thirty-two responses. It's equally as sad that doctors, sworn to do no harm, would put their 'faith' as a reason not ot offer medical care to women who desire abortions? Of course the so-called legal practice has gone underground. ABC would do better to offer an investigative report on the number of medical insurance plans that no longer offer abortions under their plans, or create a list of physicians who refuse to perform abortions because it offends their religious sense of what is right.

I really hate to say this but the issue of abortion, more so than whether or not a woman can be president, exemplifies that women are still second class citizens in America!

I'm calling merde -- a great big French farm truckload of it. Going about screaming that abortion is murder is just a way to throw women off balance so you can then control them -- or at least imagine yourself in control of them by passing controlling (and by the way destructive) laws. It is no more or less than a husband who screams "You bitch!" at his wife so he can then get his small jollies by imagining he is in control her, and by the by, be the sort of guy who is out of control of his own life so compensates by controlling his wife. It is not one jot different from calling a woman a witch. Let's see -- murder -- even if you say you are sorry and blame someone else for your behavior, you are still legally responsible. Now -- witchcraft -- all you have to do is say you are sorry and name someone else as the witch who won you over to the dark side and you are off the hook! Now which one is more like the Pro-life's attitude toward women who have had abortions? Hmm -- that's a toughy, but it seems to me that all you have to do move from "murderer" to "victim" is say your abortion was all Planned Parenthood fault! Gee -- that strategy seems familiar... Salem circa 1692 as I remember.

If you are not proposing laws that make abortion truly murder -- with more prison time for the woman who asked for the abortion than for whomever provided it, just as there is more prison time for a woman who hires an assassin to murder her child than there is for that assassin -- then grow the balls to admit that abortion is *fundamentally* different from murder or pack it in and go home. Enough already with the whole "ohitisjustlikemurder -- but -- you know -- you're really the victim." You feel this deep pain for little unborn babies -- but the poor victimized women too? Then grow up, stand up, and tell your own movement to stop opposing birth control and sex education -- the real answers. Tell them it is time to face the ugly legacy of patriarchy, the poverty and damage misogyny leaves in its wake. If you can't do that -- even if I am the only one in country willing to say it -- I'll say -- *I. Don't. Believe. You.*

This is the ultimation the whole country should be giving to the Pro-life movement.