My grandmother had to have a late-term abortion. Actually, it was my grandfather that made the decision. The doctor told him he either could save his wife or try to save the child. My grandfather chose my grandmother, and they went on to have several other children, including my mother, but I heard it tore him up to make that choice, and that was in a time (1910s) when that happened more frequently.
I don't want there to be abortions, either. However, I also think that there are philosophical and constitutional perspectives that really can't be dismissed in our society. The answer, like the answers to most questions including migration to our southern border, is to address the issue at its source. Women aren't getting abortions as birth control, as some anti-choice or pro-birth people would have us believe. No one wants to undergo any kind of medical procedure if they don't have to, even the simplest have risks. If you want to eliminate abortions, which, BTW, have been going down in our country for years, you need to better educate people, you need to provide better and more affordable healthcare, you need more social programs, you need to be in favor of contraception and work to develop more effective and reliable means of contraception, you need no address the cost of living in this country, so people can provide for children more easily and couples aren't as apt to break up for economic reasons -- either wages have to be brought up or prices have to be reduced -- and you have to do your part and then some to change the social/verbal tenor in this country where people currently think it's OK to trash anyone or anything that's not them without hesitation and in total ignorance.
Obviously, some of those things cost money. If you truly are pro-life, though, should that matter?
For that matter, if you truly are pro-life, why would you have any issue with any of those things? They not only would diminish the amount of abortions, they would also make a better quality of life for the living and probably result in longer, happier lives.
I'm reminded of a talk I had with a neighbor about eight years ago, a woman very proud of her evangelical Christian mindset that guides her life. I posted to her what I posted above here, and her response was that we shouldn't do those things because the dime out of every paycheck to fund it was unfair to ask and we have, her words, not mine, "too many freeloaders in our country already."
Yep. Just bring up paying for a social program and all those beautiful unborn babies turned into freeloaders even before they were born, let alone before they were 18.
To me, that's the real height of hypocrisy. It's claiming you are for the baby and yet not having a lick of concern for the person it because once it emerges from the womb. It's saying you want to diminish abortions but only being willing to do that through a government ban.
For more than 50 years, alternatives to enacting laws to restrict or eliminate abortions were available, and yet the pro-life movement never was willing to move an inch toward them or compromise in any way. To me, that makes it complicit in every abortion that took place since Roe v Wade. If the unborn life matters, every unborn life matters, and every method to save it should be pursued, otherwise, it's just a talking point, a cheap political trick. If you want to decrease/end abortions but only are willing to do it in your own unique, most-extreme way, then you must live with what you say are the blood of the innocents you want to attribute solely to others being on your hands, too, because you had the means to make it happen but were too worried about your wallet or dogma to negotiate, compromise and make it happen.
