But women don't choose abortion or joyously welcome a pregnancy based upon their beliefs on personhood. They decide based upon the interweaving of their relationships and responsibilities at a given moment in time. Most of us also find abortions much more troubling, ethically and emotionally, when they occur later in pregnancy. But abortion laws and policies that impose expenses and delays actually increase the number of later abortions. Laws requiring them to tell their parents or get permission from a judge make them delay even longer.
Access is limited, even for grown women.
More than 80 percent of U.S. counties don't have abortion clinics, forcing many women to make expensive and time-consuming trips to the doctor. And because abortions are not covered by Medicaid, some women cannot save enough money before they require a more difficult and more costly procedure. This restriction and delay results not just in late abortions but in desperate women giving birth in secret and dead newborns being found in toilets and dumpsters. I spent the last academic year at Harvard Divinity School teaching and researching some religious aspects of the abortion issue - elements not easily reduced to sound bites or legal arguments. Among them was a newspaper photograph of Dr. Barnett Slepian, the obstetrician and abortion provider who'd been shot dead in his Buffalo home just that week.