I can't believe that in this day and age, the abortion debate is still going strong.
I live in a small town, so I was surprised to see a man standing on the side of a "busy" street, holding up a picture of an aborted fetus. He was yelling something, but I didn't stop to hear it.... hopefully the young children walking by didn't either.
I'm not pregnant, never have been. I hope to never be, however, if my method of birth control fails me, and I do end up pregnant - I won't abort. Not because abortion is wrong - but because I'm in a situation where if that's what life throws at me, I'm able to catch it. I do however enjoy having that option there, not to use, just to have. Makes me proud to live in a society where women have that option, that right, and the other rights that we also have.
I won't take any of my rights for granted, and even if I don't use them, that doesn't mean I will not protect them from those who wish to take them away, for any reason. It's like vaccines.
After a vaccine eradicates an illness, some people have the tendency to believe that we don't need to be vaccinated anymore - not necessary, and even potentially harmful. So just because someone tells me that society, as a whole, agrees that women are not the property of men, I'm not about to agree with any revoking of laws that prevent slavery. Like an illness suppressed by medication, slavery can come back, if we stop taking our meds.
I'm going a bit off topic here, I just wanted to state why it's important to keep society on the right moral path, creating new rights and freedoms to accompany what already exists, instead of taking away those rights... which I unfortunately see all too often.
If we tell women they are not allowed to abort a pregnancy, for any reason, that's one step back in time, to a place where women didn't have any rights at all. If you're not a woman who wants an abortion, that probably doesn't mean much to you. But it should. If the government can take away that right, even in the face of a majority who disagrees, what's stopping them from putting more of our rights on the chopping block?
A woman's right to choose whether or not to reproduce is vital. If you tell her that if she has sex, she must endure the consequences that may arise, you might as well tell her that if she walks down the street and is raped, that it's her fault because she dare show her face in public. It's literally saying that women are not allowed to have sex for any other reason than to reproduce. Guess what? That also means that men are not to have sex unless they intend on impregnating their partner. While you just want to get off, your intentions are brought into question, and the opinions of others has a huge impact on the most personal and private, and sometimes significant aspects of your life. Is that something you're willing to give into?
We live in a part of the world where people are able to do this to themselves, with the paid assistance of a highly trained, licensed "professional":


.... which also undoubtedly comes with both social and physical repercussions. Yet there's laws that attack normal people in normal predicaments. Basic research will tell you that slightly more than half of all pregnancies are unplanned.. that's enough to tell me that this happens frequently enough not to call a case abnormal. Since it's not wrong to hope that everyone gets the opportunity to have sex in their lives, I believe it's extremely beneficial to bring more choice into parenthood, so more pregnancies are planned, and more children get to grow up in better environments.

I can't sit and listen to the empty arguments from people who think they know that only bad can come from a woman's right to choose, because it is legal in places, and those places are not suffering from baby shortages, or a 50 percent drop in birthrates. Unplanned babies will continue to be born, because there's average people like me who do not want kids, but will embrace pregnancy if something unplanned happens. Even people who shouldn't reproduce, will. People who are severely poor, who can't offer a safe environment to raise a child, will (scratch that) do still have babies.

I get it though. Nobody wants to say it's ok to end a life, especially one with as much potential. I don't think there's anything ok with it. Death is a bad scarey thing, but it holds true for all life. We don't have to like it, though we have to accept it. We don't control it all, we don't always have a say. Sometimes we do though, and I strongly believe that being a parent should be one of those things.