I don't like the idea of abortion, but there's two angles where it undeniably gets hairy. My first case...
Woman's risk: There's often the situation where there's a strong/certain chance the mother will die if she tries to continue her pregnancy to term, combined with a negligible, strong, or certain chance the unborn would die as well. There obviously has to has to be some instances where abortion would need to be legal (where both risks of death are certain or nearly certain), but if you still want abortion illegal in general, then you are going to have to come up with some risk threshold/cutoff. It's going to be hard to come up with a fair criteria that doesn't give doctors considerable leeway.
Of course, that may not be enough to make you give up, so let's consider my other angle. The following quote was thrown around: "If you didn't want the baby, you shouldn't have had sex in the first place." This retort neglects one serious case...
Rape: It's the scenario where the "choice" of whether to have sex is taken away, and often violently. It's problematic because...
1) Rape is common. You can't just say we will handle it on a case-by-case basis.
2) There would need to be, at a minimum, a rape exception. Without it, all women face the fear of having their career/economic status damned at any moment. Furthermore, rapists would be even more encouraged to continue their practice: their desire of rape isn't to have sex, but to excercise power over someone else, and the lack of a rape exception would give them more room to do damage.
3) You actually have to enforce that rape exception somehow. In particular, you have to decide what strength of evidence there needs to be. I'll open a couple subsections for this:
A) The strongest policy would be to require a rape convinction. Unfortunately, this is impractical for several reasons: One, rape is *hard* to prove in court, and many legit cases will not result in convinction (since you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and the evidence simply may not be there; not only do you need physical evidence, but you need to prove that the sex wasn't consensual). Even more, because you do have a rape exception, then the man can use the argument of "It was consensual; she's just accusing me because she wants an abortion," and it'll be hard to disprove it. Rape will become *nearly impossible* to prove, so nearly none of these raped woman will get their abortion.
Also, many criminal cases take a lot time to put together. The baby may already be well-developed or even delivered before the case concludes, and many will argue that you are committing a worse crime by aborting a five month fetus compared to a five day fetus.
B) A weaker threshold would not require the woman to acquire a convinction. Unfortunately, if she doesn't need a convinction, then there's inevitably going to be scenarios where a woman (possibly with accomplices with testimony) that wasn't raped could put together enough evidence to get the abortion but of course would not necessarily need to get anyone convincted in the process. In other words, it's just a matter of putting together a decent rape story/conspiracy to get the abortion without losing any friends.
Point is, any rape exception you may make is going to either be inadequate (A) or loophole-ridden (B).
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Seeing as a rape exception (and medical exception) can't be both sufficient and not manipulable, and that not allowing abortions in those cases leads to a terrifying culture for women, we have no choice but to settle for a more relaxed abortion policy. This means uninhibited access to abortion (at least early-term). A moderate ruling based on this idea is Roe v/ Wade: Access is easy early on, but states have the right to make abortion harder late in the pregnancy (if it's in the last trimester, you can just induce an early delivery if you really need to).
Now, some may argue that we should make late-term abortions harder. However, it's worth pointing out they are pretty rare already:
Time in gestation of (legal) abortion:
0-8 weeks: 58% (avg of 7.25% per week)
8-12 weeks: 30% (avg of 7.50% per week)
12-20 weeks: 10.5% (avg of 1.31% per week)
20 weeks - birth (typically ~39 weeks): 1.5% (average of 0.08% per week)
Source, but this data is presented in sentences.
As such, people in practice generally do not take late-term abortion lightly, and legislating a time threshold won't have a major impact; in fact, it may just lead to those people getting their abortions earlier, and you may very well see an *increase* in abortions. Some women that otherwise may go on to deliver may panic and abort out of fear, afraid that something may go wrong during the remainder of the pregnancy and that they won't have that abortion lifeline to save them.
As such, I think our current setup is fine. It's not going to be satisfying, but making it any more restrictive is just going to make things suck.
"Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!"
It's perfect if you think about it.
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Of course, there is still a way to reduce abortions without making them illegal: educate teenagers about birth control, and get them access to contraceptives.
Studies generally support that this helps. Teaching good communication / relationship skills and otherwise empowering teenagers to take control and responsibility in their lives can't hurt either (if you don't address their problems, you allow them to become depressed and more vulnerable to unhealthy/unsafe relationships, which often involve *unprotected* sex).
The fact *many* (albeit far from all) conservatives fight comprehensive sex education shows you that they aren't interested in reducing the number of abortions, but that they absolutely must have their religious dogma enforced by the government.
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And in response to Hadriel, that's hilarious. As for the legal rammifications of sex'ing a robot, I think you may be in the clear as long as the robot remains strictly a program that hasn't crossed the "uncanny valley" that gives the robot the ability to really "think" for itself. After that, it gets hard, because you get into all kinds of sticky "consent" issues.
*grumble*
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