I don't believe I'm jumping in here, but I've gotten tired of reading (and during medical school discussing) abortion without ever seeming to get to the crux of the reason for the debate, which is (in my mind) the whole debate rests on one central question, and depending on what you believe most people will fall squarely on one side or the other, and it is such a core belief that is unlikely to change in most people-- so discussing it ad nauseum in medical school is of little value. The central question is whether or not a fetus is a human being/when does human life begin.
If you believe that human life begins at conception, or in the first few weeks, then OF COURSE abortion is wrong. If you really believe life begins at conception, then it IS morally wrong to participate in abortion in any way unless the mother's health is in danger (including referrals-- if you ascribe to this position a referral would be morally akin to hiring a hit man, rather than committing a murder yourself), because if you really believe it is a living human being at that point, then it would be murder, and no different than killing a newborn.
If you do not believe that human life begins at conception, or does not begin until a certain point (ie birth), then OF COURSE abortion is right. If the fetus is not a human being, but is just tissue then it can't be wrong to remove it, and no woman should have to think twice about it, anymore than they would about removing a mole. Inconvienence is ample justification for removing it.
The problem of course is that science hasn't/can't define the moment when human life begins. Hence we all make that decision for ourselves, based either on our spiritual beliefs or what we've been taught by parents or teachers, and our beliefs on abortion follow accordingly. Unfortunately, rather than acknowledge what the actual issue/question is, too many other social/political, etc factors have clouded the issue. Both sides argue the point based on their underlying belief, and both sides ignore that the other side is right IF their underlying belief is true. And since this fact gets ignored, neither side can ever see where the other side is coming from.
Since we can't prove conclusively when human life actually begins there is very little chance of having meaningful debate on the issue. Instead the issue becomes a smokescreen for the other social agendas of both parties, and specious and unsupportable arguments (that sometimes become ludicrous) are made by both sides. Data from either side is somewhat suspect, given the inherent difficulties in collecting such information and the inevitable biases of the collecting organizations. Hence we lack good data on the issues. For example don't really know if outlawing abortions would prevent abortions, nor do we know what the rate of morbidity/mortality would actually be for illegal abortions as obviously finding out the number of illegal abortions occurring (needed for the denominator) would be next to impossible. We can have our suspicions about what the date might say, but we don't really know, and we all know that the data can be surprising when things are just assumed. So we don't have good data to bring to the argument, or to be used in making social policy (even if we could divorce the emotional context from the issue). Bottom line-- I'd rather see the energy and passion that people display in arguing with each other used on the issues we can actually make progress on, or at the very least developing good research that allows us to have some factual, unbiased information on which to make policy decisions. Yeah, that's a pipe dream, I know.
