Well, abortion strikes me as an inelegant method. I mean, it's expensive, it's nontrivial, and it's way more complicated than a lot of other methods of not having kids. Which is, for me, where the idea that it should be a last resort comes from. There's a particular chain of events that leads to the production of a mewling sack of child-meat, and a number of places in which that chain can be broken. (Well, it's more like two converging chains of events.)

And there's also an idea that abortion is an evil. A necessary evil, but an evil. I believe that if you ask some upstanding feminist ladies, "given the choice between needing an appendectomy at some point next year, and needing an abortion at some point next year (for absolutely nontraumatic reasons), which would you choose?", a goodly number would rather have an appendectomy. I don't think people are really entirely kosher with the idea. I suppose moominmuppet would know this better than I would, but I don't think that women skip out of the clinic, paying their procedure no more mind than tey'd pay the removal of an ingrown toenail.

See, if you're getting an abortion, either you're thinking, "there's no killing going on here", or "there's killing going on here, but I'm okay with that, possibly for my own safety, or possibly for my own convenience." And I'd wager that a lot of people who say the former have, to some extent, internalized the latter. 'Cause if folks really believed the former, it'd be morally equivalent to getting that ingrown toenail out, now wouldn't it?

Hell, I'll go a little further. Anyone who says that abortion should be rare and doesn't really give a reason for it (I don't think I've ever heard "it's expensive and inelegant"; I suppose socially induced shame would be a likely one, but that applies to individuals, not to global abortion rates) believes that abortion is murder, and is okay with that murder for their own safety, or much more likely, for their own convenience. I suppose verbalizing this would make for a big sack of cognitive dissonance--many of the things we believe to get by are self-contradictory--so we don't talk about them much.

And yes, I do think that 'convenience' is a very small word for what can be a life-altering event. But that's what it boils down to, isn't it? Either you believe it's murder and won't let yourself think about it too hard, or you believe it's an ingrown toenail.

Man, no wonder people get so traumatized.

(In case you're thinking of tarring me as a pro-lifer come to troll Sarah's journal, I assure you that I am firmly in the toenail camp. However, I'm wombless, so my opinion here is of only academic interest.)

It'd make sense, also, if abortion is seen as an indication that all other methods have failed. Through the marvels of technology, we construct systems ranging from "cross your fingers and hope" to combinations of techniques that stop the process at a variety of levels (for instance, the pill, condoms and spermicides can all be used together, but all work at different points in the process). It'd be easy to take the failure of that constructed system as an indication that something had been done wrong--and it'd be natural to assume that one would patch it to close the presumed loophole which had led to the system's failure.

So, getting an abortion is like having your box get r00ted and needing a clean reinstall. It's time-consuming, difficult and embarrassing, and you'll face disapproval from your peers because of the belief that it shouldn't have come to that.

Huh. That analogy works better than I expected.

I also think it's important to distinguish between the opinion "it's important to reduce the number of abortions performed in general" and "it's important that I have as few abortions as possible". For the latter, factors like social disapproval and being hassled by protesters can be taken into account; it's the opinion on the former issue I'm more interested in.