Reply #10: It's also very important to understand that until

[SheilaT]

relatively recently, abortions tended to be very dangerous for the mother. For almost all of human history, any attempt to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy stood a pretty good chance of killing the mother. With infant and child mortality very high, it mattered a lot to most cultures that women's lives be preserved so they could have children, only a few of whom would live to grow up. And so laws and cultural mores that strongly condemn abortion make a lot of sense.

But things are a lot different now. Most babies -- especially in first world countries -- do live to grow up. Women can do better for the children they do have if they don't have very many, and control just when they actually come. Birth control is not a perfect guarantee against unplanned/unwanted pregnancy. Modern methods of abortion don't kill or maim women.

Oh, and in a lot of pre-modern cultures, leaving unwanted babies to die was fairly common. Kind of abortion after birth, so to speak.