For the same reason that heart surgery should be rare, though there's nothing wrong with it. Surgeries are risky procedures to correct medical problems. It's always better if the medical problems don't occur in the first place.

They can't stop all contraception but by removing abortion as a backstop when contraception fails they hope to come as close as they can in practice to a situation where every sex act carries the risk of parenthood. Removing the security that abortion as a backup provides in this regard is the desperate goal of the right.

This just isn't true at the overwhelming majority of "prolife" events, the belief that it is one of the many, unfortunately all too common, examples of people literally seeing what they believe and not what is in front of their eyes. In fact there isn't much of a gender divide on views of abortion.

Abortion might have changed the US,I can not be sure of this, certainly China and India, but to say it has changed the world is really naive. This is a sweeping statement bordering on ignorance,under false assumptions of the extent of US influence in the world.Pure wishful thinking.When I stayed in Eastern Europe in 1964, abortion was freely available.

What puzzles me is the question of abortion taking such a prominent place in family planning, instead of contraception.The so called pro-choice movement has become obssessed with abortion which in turn is the Holy Grail for the feminist movement. Why is contraception not playing the most important role? Condoms for example are far cheaper, more easily available, and more importantly prevent STD as well. I suppose women may not feel in charge because condoms put men in control.But then there are hormone injections/implants for longer periods.There are also the female "condoms" which are caps to cover the cervix(entrance of the womb) plus spermicide.Abortion is OK if all else fails.But for women to say legalized abortions means taking control of their bodies is a phantasy. Legal abortions are performed under anesthesia in hospitals by doctors. This means the gynaecologist and the anesthetist have quite a lot to say about the procedure.They are responsible for keeping the woman, who is now a patient,safe.So where is where is this "my body is mine and I can do as I please with it when I please?"I am professionally involved in this as a doctor and I am happy to help at all times, but still I do believe that contraception should receive far more attention than abortion, which is a surgical procedure,plus the anesthetic. But of course,abortion should be available when needed.

It really doesn't. What matters is that my body should not be used to nourish someone else without my consent. I have the right to control who enters my house. If someone enters my house without my consent, I do not owe him room and board, and I have the right to throw him out by violent means. If someone enters my body without my consent, the law should not force me to jeopardize my health and risk my life in order to allow that person to grow.

To all the pro-lifers in this discussion: how many of you have donated bone marrow to a child who would die without it? (I guess they don't matter once they're born...) Is it moral of you to refrain from donating bone marrow when you know that a child would die without it? What about kidney donation? Do you think that people should be forced to donate blood, bone marrow, or kidneys if the patient's life is at stake?

Wrong, dude. It's an intern.

But you have not observed the color of the stars correctly. Those are not gold stars - those are red stars.

Now you understand the ideology of the editor.

We are experiencing a marked reduction in the births of our Caucasion population due in great part to the role abortion plays in this. But abortion is not as common in some of the immigrant communities so in time when these people become the majority they will stop aborions for all.

The greatest killer of fetuses is not abortion -- it is miscarriage. If one believes that God acts in a specific way to imbue a fertilized egg with a soul at the moment of conception, then one must also believe that God acts in a specific way to periodically prevent the egg that He just fertilized from implanting in the uterus. One must similarly believe that God acts in a specific way to periodically cause spontaneous uterine bleeding, or to periodically imbue with a soul a fertilized egg so genetically misprogrammed that it has no chance of living through to birth, or to periodically cause a fetus's heart to stop beating, in each instance resulting in a miscarriage. Fully one-third of all pregnancies end in miscarriage (and that doesn't include the fertilized eggs that don't implant, because -- regardless of what some scientists have to say -- the medical community does not consider a woman pregnant until the egg has implanted, not just been fertilized), which means that God, if the ensoulment doctrine is to be believed, causes abortion to occur at a higher rate than any women cause abortion to occur in the United States. Again -- that's only measuring pregnancies from the moment of implantation. Think of how many more abortions God performs when he prevents the eggs He just fertilized from implanting!

So, for believers in an interventionist God who ascribe to the ensoulment doctrine, I challenge you to explain to me the purpose in such a setup. Why would God choose to ensoul at conception? Why wouldn't God choose to ensoul at implantation, for example, which is at least something that doctors could measure (the implanted egg causes HCG to be released into the body; that's the chemical compound measured in blood and urine pregnancy tests)? Why wouldn't God choose to ensoul at 13 weeks, when the risk of miscarriage drops significantly? Why wouldn't God choose to ensoul at the moment of fetal viability outside the womb? Why wouldn't He choose a time that would avoid the waste of a great many of His precious souls?

And -- most importantly -- if He so chooses a moment that permits a rather cavalier treatment of those souls (seeing as He Himself chooses to waste fully 1/3 of them), then why is abortion a moral problem? If God flushes away souls frequently by preventing implantation, why are so-called abortifacient birth control methods considered murder? If God frequently causes spontaneous uterine bleeding or causes a genetically damaged embryo to die, why is it considered murder when a woman permits her doctor to start that bleeding?

Sure, I know what's coming -- God then is the killer of each of us, and then the line of reasoning is simply that at each moment God is in control and any death is okay because God has chosen the time and we are subject to God's will. But if that's the line of reasoning, then we shouldn't outlaw lead paint or teach people how to use firearms safely or mourn mass killings -- or any death for that matter. All deaths are good because they're God's chosen way for a given person to go, right? In that line of reasoning, though, even the current read of murder statutes should be discarded, because a person causing the death of even a fully-grown adult is not doing anything more than effecting God's will. And, going further, abortion shouldn't be considered immoral, because a woman and her doctor terminating her pregnancy are just being actors effecting whatever God's will happens to be, which is that the fetus will die by a person's hand and not His own.

And yes, the whole devil business comes in, but then one can't really claim a link to a true understanding of God's actions and motives. One can only assign morality based on the Bible, and only do so by way of analogy and questionable reads of ancient languages, because this interventionist God, this God who has time for football games and math tests and the career arcs of gansta rappers, has decided not to provide any clear public policy guidance about ensoulment. His various emissaries on earth disagree about it, His book is cryptic, and His only way of asserting His will is on an individual basis by way of the consciences of His followers. And if a believer's conscience is the real guide, the only one that can clearly be trusted, well -- we come to pro-choice political position. A woman should choose, because God will either tell her to do it or not to do it. If He tells her to do it, it's not immoral, and if He tells her not to do it and she does it anyway, then her soul will pay the price.

No one else can know the journey of her soul, and no one else can know how God chooses to use her life to put forth His will. So why should government interfere? How does a legislator know God's will so clearly as to legislate this private, moral, conscience-based choice for all women? Why should a legislator, who swears to defend a Constitution that permits free exercise of religious beliefs, interfere with the moral conscience of a woman as informed by her relationship with God? Where religions agree, where religious beliefs and public policy have common objectives -- those types of legislated moral policy make sense. But where there is deep divergence, how do we answer these questions for all people, when the questions asked are so personal, so intertwined with sectarian belief? Pluralism requires that we rely on God to act through us and not through our elected representatives.