I hope you don't mind my joining the discussion, although last time I looked it was only 5 pages long..

This is a very interesting discussion, good thoughts and all that. Excellent debating skills and many are a little too heady for reality, in my opinion.

These thoughts are explaining/justifying what you already feel and what we feel about life is a very personal and individual thing. So I'm with Toby on this, we cannot decide what is right for others, and, since we have to look at our social contexts, I also agree to a point Thycydides says too, to a very small degree.

You all make such rational arguments, but life itself is not rational.

I personally believe that person hood begins at first breath. Until that moment, the fetus is dependent on the mother. The fetus up until about 6 months of gestation cannot survive outside of the womb and between this time and it's full gestation an incubator may keep it alive, but at horrible physical and mental and material costs. I'm all for the life of the disabled, hell I am disabled, but when our actions cause that disability it's worth reconsidering.

To consider abortion as murder is simplistic and at best it is potentially a justification to proscribe women rules that roughly half the population will never have to personally follow. There are no laws that say if a man helps to conceive a child he has to be as responsible -- with the exception of financial support, if he has the money and if she has the money to pay for a lawyer to get him to pay. Many men wheedle out of this at every opportunity.

Ultimately men are not required to emotionally and physically engage in their child's well being on a daily basis -- this is why there are far more single mothers than single fathers.

Malcom Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, finds a direct correlation between a decrease in crime rates and the R v W decision, based on the fact that 20 years after R v W there were fewer unwanted pregnancies and therefore fewer children being born into neglect and abuse who grow up with limited options and self beliefs (the precursors to engaging in criminal behaviour). He goes further to suggest that the mother will always do what is best for her child, and on this point I agree. If a woman has the freedom, social and emotional, to choose she will chose what is best for that individual life that she is carrying -- including choosing not to attempt to care for a child she is unprepared to care for.

Consider: A woman get's impregnated by an abusive man, she realizes she has a choice to give birth or abort. Giving birth means, likely, the following: the child will be born into an abusive home, and will suffer that abuse indirectly if not directly. The woman will now be tied to the abuser (even if she divorces him, he's still the father), and becomes resentful and may potentially harm / neglect the child for keeping her tied this person. The child is the ultimate victim, helpless to alter it's environment, it becomes a disenfranchised part of society and goes on to a life that is reflective of it's upbringing.

Yes, I'll grant you there is a percentage of people who grow up to over come all kids of odds, maybe as much as 50% (though I think that's too high, given how brains and beings develop -- if I child does not have it's physical, mental and emotional needs met from the get go, the hard wiring of the brain is directly effected (See Lehrer "How We decide").

With no choice of abortion there is a much greater chance of ruined lives, both of the mothers' and these children. With abortion there is a fewer number of unwanted pregnancies and thus unwanted / neglected/ abused children. Again, I'm not saying there aren't mothers who will rise to the occasion of unexpected pregnancy; I am saying only the individual mother can decide this for herself and her child. To repeat, if we force a woman to have a child and to raise it there is a serious chance of life long and socially effecting damage to that child.

Consider the woman who get's pregnant on a date. She is well supported, financially and socially, and has the tools she needs to raise this child by herself, chances are she will not choose abortion because the mother's she knows she has what she needs to raise the child that is growing inside her.

Few woman who choose abortion do so easily or selfishly. The biological imperative and all those hormones make it a very hard choice indeed. Ultimately, it is the most personal choice one can make, again one in which about half the population is guaranteed to never have to contemplate (men) and for that reason can never understand fully.

Humans are at the top of the food chain, and it is woman who sustain the population on this earth and for a long time it men have controlled that by subjugating women through manipulation of exclusive paternalistic religions and social norms that became laws woman had to fight so that their society would stop excluding them. Remember, it's not even been a hundred years since women got the vote in Western countries...

Test tubes alone will not create a life. The womb is still irreplaceable. For that women have harder choices, abortion being but one of them. Because we humans are at the top of the food chain, we have to work in ways to diminish negative growth, for want of a better term. It's better for a woman to make her own choices when it comes to giving birth to an individual, than for others to decide for her. We could be supporting her no matter what she chooses for herself and her child, or we could be giving her and her child a life sentence of further limitations and fewer choices for her and her child.

You've mixed your metaphors by including murder and it's effect and suicide in a discussion of abortion. These are discrete life issues and choices. Their contexts are different and need to be considered in their separately. I will ask this: how many murderers do you think come from loving and supportive homes in healthy communities that are inclusive and accepting of cultural and ethnic differences? Once you exclude the psychopaths -- though even with these, you might want to consider the environment they are raised in -- not a one, I bet.

To speak to suicide, because others have:

I can also say that the right to our end our own lives is just as personal. Since we do not know if there is "something" after, we have to base it on the present. We're all going to die folks and to have the freedom and support to make this choice is the only thing that matters. I wonder how many of you would stick by a suicidal friend or family member reminding them that they are of value every day and that they are loved, even if all they do is sit around in the depths of mental hell and bemoan their lives. Not many, we tend to avoid the freaky people don't we? Suicide is often death by anomie. (Note to all the freaky people out there one friend can make it all worth while, really)

Suicide in the context of medical issues is a whole 'nother point to be considered, and if we don't allow the individual who is suffering a physical hell--that the mere thought of scares most of us senseless--this courageous choice, then again we are proscribing our personal views onto an individual's life of which death is a part and we are not seeing the picture clearly. There are things much worse than death.

Would you really want immense suffering for some one you love, just so you don't have to say goodbye today? That would be truly selfish and more so if you don't love them. While it's part of our biology and brain structures, enforced by social norms, to avoid death, those who know that death is but months of increasing suffering away know that death is now a choice, personal, private and deserving of compassion. Perhaps the most life affirming thing that can be done in this situation is to choose how to die.

Perhaps the most life affirming thing a woman can do is choose when she will be the best mother to her child, and until she knows she can do that, she uses present technology so that she does not hurt a the living person she will give birth to, in any way, until she is ready to be a mother. This is protection the hard way, but abortion can be an act of love too.

And for those who believe in God, do you not think God's omniscience gives him greater understanding of that individual's choice than yours? Do you not think God's compassion encompasses even those who suffer so much that death is their ultimate choice and those who want be a good parent so much that abortion is their choice? God get's it, we don't.

For those who don't believe in God and find abortion morally wrong, consider that we socially engineer our world all the time, daily overtly and subtly. Again, we are at the top of the food chain, our populations are over taking the earth in such a parasitic way that our climate is changing, our resources dwindling and our waste is every where. We have no natural predators with the exception of other humans and nature itself. The women, who "have been" subjugated into subservient roles, need their power to participate fully in life. Only female individuals can bring new life into this world and for them to do so fully means they have to choose the best way to do so as an individual from her own context. The most compassionate thing we can do is support them no matter what they decide.

So for all you who have single mother's as friends I offer up this challenge, offer to baby sit at least once a month; invite the mother and child for dinner at least once a month and let her ask you for help when she needs it, and then give it. If our social norms were such that we gave more to those who need it, in simple, compassionate and inclusive ways, all kinds of statistical numbers would change, I think.