To my mind, the anti-life mob (pro-abortion) reveal themselves for what they possibly are: shallow, callow and fallow.

The sudden flood of voices that appear on abortion comments threads here, but not on other topics, confirms the author's point.

And I fail to see what abortion stats have to do with one woman's choice over whether to terminate a pregnancy. Abortions happen one at a time. It's hard to imagine a woman who finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy rushing to the nearest statistician for advice. She's not likely to base her decision on whether or not she'll be adding to a number that makes other people unhappy.

Francis: based on what? I could just as easily call the right to lifers religious nutters, but it wouldn't get anywhere. On both sides of the debate there are people who are both compassionate and intelligent.
Name calling however, is a puerile exercise and doesn't contribute to debate.

Chainsmoker, HRS - my point exactly - like I said, it's not about numbers or politics. Just ensuring women have rights over what happens to their bodies.
The reality of banning abortions entirely is too Orwellian to contemplate.

Something has gone seriously wrong when the term "aggressive" is used to refer to people who want to use the legal system to protect human beings from aggression culminating in death...

We can all agree that it would be better if there weren’t unwanted pregnancies in the first place, but IMO that isn’t what drives many anti-abortionists. The real problem is that lurking beneath the niceties of a secular debate about public health policy, active anti-abortion campaigners are driven by religious views about the immortal human soul.

Some may point to the valid points we may hear about abortion rates, the need for genuine counselling, social stigmas, and abstinence. But these are a necessary non-theistic stalking horse for the real position.

Something like a reversing the criminalisation of abortion wouldn’t threaten anti-abortionists if their position was really based on public health arguments. Otherwise, we’d be talking about better sex and health education, public health campaigns or whatever.

The one thing decriminalisation removes is the presumption that every abortion is an illicit and wrongful act. It cannot be countenanced, because it runs contrary to the real kernel of their beliefs against abortion.

Just recently, Right to Life president Margaret Tighe said:
"I think any legislation which says a certain class of human beings can be killed is a gross abuse of human rights," she said.

The comment reveals, very clearly, what this boils down to: she thinks human rights are attached to human genetic code through an immortal soul at conception. Now, Tighe doesn’t specifically mention a soul, but let’s not torture the obvious.

So, we must now ask, is there any good reason to believe human rights work like that, even if we don’t accept a soul? Or, do we have any clear counter-example that human being need not carry rights?

An anencephalic foetus, for example, has no brain stem, and no capacity for consciousness or feeling ever. For such human biological matter, which can never attain any interior existence, it is manifestly absurd to talk of rights. A thing cannot have rights if it has no capacities for those rights, and will never have such capacities. Yet this is exactly what the Tighes of the world demand of us. Let's move beyond the fake debate.

I always think of the Helen Garner quote where she said something about how much she respected a woman's adamantine resolve not to have a child she cannot adequately parent.
As BBoy says, this debate actually comes down to whether you value the idea of an immortal soul over the proper parenting of a real, living, breathing, suffering child. Let those who believe in immortal souls adamantinely refuse to ever have abortions, I applaud their right to decide against it, I absolutely support their right to try to persuade others (respectfully) not to have an abortion either, but I absolutely object to their desire to force women to have children they do not want and cannot bring up properly via legislation.
Isn't there a section in the book Freakenomics that points out that exactly 18 years after Roe v Wade (the breakthrough pro-choice decision in the US) the crime rate fell? And that the authors assumed the results were just a freak co-incidence until they found that in other US states that had decriminalised abortion prior to Roe v Wade, they also had a drop in the crime rate exactly 18 years after the law changed? Unwanted children often have very crap lives. There really are many, many worse things than not being born.