For the purposes of this thread I am referring to abortion used as a means of birth control ONLY. I am specifically excluding instances where:

--Continuation of the pregnancy constitutes a risk to the mother; or

--The child is likely to be born with a congenital disease such as haemophilia, spina bifida or Tay-Sachs

In other words I am considering the case of a healthy foetus in a healthy mother where the most likely outcome of continuing the pregnancy is a healthy child born to a healthy mother.

Question:

How late into pregnancy should "birth control abortion" be permitted?

Defend your answer SCIENTIFICALLY – ie no recourse to religious texts.

Note, I am not asking what the law says but what you believe the law OUGHT to say - and why.

How would you modify your answer if you learned that the reason for the abortion was that the couple wanted a child of a different sex?

Dear Stephen,

I'm not sure I can accept the premise of your title “A challenge for pro-abortionists”. I don't think many people are pro abortion, I'm certainly not. By not being anti-abortion it doesn't then follow that one must be pro-abortion.

I would put myself more in the pro-choice camp.

So I must respectfully decline the challenge.

LOL csteele, let me rephrase:

THIS IS A CHALLENGE TO PEOPLE WHO ARE PRO-CHOICE

Not pro-abortion but pro-choice.

I apologise for the error.

I am with csteele on this one. I too am pro-choice, not pro-abortion.
No one likes to see abortion as a result of failed contraception or preferred method of birth control.

I am disgusted by this form of birth control, which is usually confined to the socially and economically disadvantaged groups of women and their partners, who are ignorant or apathetic about good forms of contraception- especially those that have multiple abortions.

As a general rule, abortions like these are carried out only up to about the 12th week of pregnancy, and the pregnant woman and her doctor usually come up with some other reason for requesting the abortion.

More effective sex education and contraception methods should be employed to help prevent these sorts of abortions from occurring.

12 weeks - because that is generally the timeframe in which many pregnancies fail naturally. Beyond that - only in unusual circumstances and under legislated conditions perhaps.

I am not pro-abortion but I am a realist. Unwanted pregnancies will happen and solutions will be sought. It is not for me to judge a woman who does not wish to carry a child. I would rather subsidise the cost of her termination than the cost of her unwanted, neglected child and all the associated on-goings.

Ditto I would prefer to subsidise the adoption process for neglected/abused children rather than see them returned to deadbeat parents who just keep doing the same thing and surgical sterilization for said deadbeats so they can't produce any more little victims ......But that's another subject

Steven, I think you need to provide some evidence that women routinely, or even commonly, have abortions as a means for contraception.

In my experience, the women whom I've known who've had abortions did so when contraception failed or when the foetus was flawed.

In such instances - and indeed in any others where women decide that they are incapable of carrying a foetus to term for whatever reason, I'm most definitely 'pro-choice'.

As others have said, I think there are few people who are 'pro-abortion' per se.