""A group of eight cells held together by the egg membrane is now a child!"

You got it in one. "

M Whitehouse, seems like you got it wrong in one!

An organism is not a child. 8 cells can set off parental
feelgood and maternal hormones, that still does not
make them a child.

Reality does not go away, when you close your eyes and
wish it would, no matter how many hormones are flowing.

Crumpethead... you are far away from the truth if you think I am a right to lifer... I am not. I absolutely believe that a woman should have the right to control her own fertility. But, I am a woman and I have only outlined the circumstances that I have personally come into contact with. FYI both of my pregnancies were very high risk for Downs Syndrome where my partner and I had decide to terminate the pregnancy if the amniocentesis came back positive for Down Syndrome, we consider ourselves lucky they came back with no fetal abnormalities.

Regarding the Implanon... $30 is exactly what it cost me to get it inserted, including the script... and to be honest, $30 for three years contraception is very cheap and completely blows out the water an argument that contraception is expensive.

It does not change the fact that there are women (and their partners) out there who consider abortion to be contraception which it is NOT... contraception prevents implantation of the embryo. I am by no means suggesting that this is the case with all terminations... but I am stating that there are far too many where this is the case.

Oh Mary Whitehouse and others "A group of eight cells held together by the egg membrane is now a child!"

I would disagree with that statement. A child has developed to a point where certain other characteristics distinguish it from an embryo.

Most significantly, a child has exited the body of the mother and is no longer exclusively dependent upon the mothers’ bodily functions for nutrients and oxygen. Transition from an embryo to a child is most notably celebrated, socially, by the issue of a birth certificate.

Pretending to assign the rights of a child, which exists outside the body of the mother and can be cared for even following the death of the mother by someone else, to something which is exclusively dependent upon the mother and her functions is bunkum.

The pretense is doubly offensive when it is undertaken to empower a (often religious) minority who seek to control the sexual lives of strangers and force them to accept the minority's obsessive and misrepresentative demands.

Placing the rights of an embryo before the rights of the woman in whose body it is developing and her right to abort, should she wish, implies you have relegated her rights to being no more than that of a life support system. Such a view is, again, grossly offensive.

Does Australia still suffer from the same high abortion to live birth ratio as it did a few years ago.

In about 2001 there were about 117,000 live births and 56,000 or 80,000 or 100,000 abortions depending whether you only count Australian citizens or include Australian residents or just count the number of procedures performed

In 2006 there were 265,922 births.

I think the birth rate mirrors consumer confidence. When people are unsure about their future they do not have children, Australia's birth rate was very low in the 1930s.

BTW, for what it's worth, the countries in the world with the lowest abortion rates are generally Western European countries like Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands where abortions are easily available to all women, including via RU-486.
Australia's abortion rate is over twice that of those nations.
Parts of the world where abortion is illegal, such as Africa and Latin America, generally have the highest abortion rates of all.

While you can't prove a correlation here (that making abortion more accessible generally leads to lower abortion rates), you certainly can't claim that making it more accessible leads to higher rates, as some pro-lifers would like to.

That’s true, wizofaus, that countries with the most liberal abortion laws have the lowest abortion rates. I think there’s a lot more equality between the sexes as well. I know for a fact that in the Netherlands, sex-ed is not just learning about the basics, but is a subject in itself and very comprehensive. Contraception is free as well.

Meelamay, if contraception is indeed so affordable, perhaps the cost then it won’t make much difference to the number of abortions. I’m not sure whether it has now changed, but in the recent past in the Netherlands, not only women could get free contraception but men also could get a year’s long prescription that enabled them to pick up free boxes of condoms from the chemist. Anyway, the abortion rate now in the Netherlands is 4.2 for every 1000 women, which is the lowest in the world.

It looks very much like the countries that are not totally obsessed with the sexual behaviour of mainly women and are not worried that women have as much sexual freedom as men, are really experiencing lower abortion rates. In all of the countries where abortion rates are high, we’ll see oppression of women also.
I am convinced, until someone shows me otherwise, that ‘saving "babies" ’ is absolutely NOT what it is all about. If it was, then the Vatican and all religious leaders would be handing out free condoms by the boxful especially to unmarried men.

At the moment, they choose to not to face the fact that sexual behaviour amongst teenagers and unmarried people happens.
Protesting against abortions is a totally useless, even harmful act.
Denying comprehensive sex-ed is totally useless, and contributes to high abortion numbers.
Protesting against contraception is the most dumb thing anti-abortionists can do.

Anti-abortionists such as religious leaders who object to contraception prove that for them, it is not 'all about saving "babies" '.