Abortion ...

A lot of people view abortion as a woman's rights issue, of whether or not a woman has the right to her own body.  I don't.  I view it as a question of when it is the state's responsibility to step in and protect a living being.  For me, the issue of whether or not abortion should be permitted by law is solely an issue of when the fetus is a baby, of when the fetus is alive.  If it is not alive, then the state has no business regulating it.  If it is alive, then the state must protect it, as it does infants and toddlers, etcetera.  There is a lot of black and white in abortion, like after the fetus is viable, I think that arguments against it being alive are pretty weak.  Also, after it is viable, it does not need the mother's body to survive, so arguments against it benefitting the mother are fairly weak (although I do not think that that should be the criteria for when an abortion is performed, unless it is a medical reason).  On the other end of the spectrum, I don't think that contraceptives or the morning after pill can justifiably be regulated by the state.  There is, however, a grey area.  That is the area after fertilization and before viability.  Science seems to increasingly show that there are strong signs of life in the second trimester, but the first trimester is very debatable.  It is in this grey area that the big question, I believe, comes, and that is whether or not the state has the right to mandate, in that first trimester, whether or not the embryo is a living being.  There are two sides to the debate about whether it is or is not living, and making abortion illegal in that first trimester is taking a firm stance on one side of the issue.  There can be very real, rational debate about whether or not abortion is morally or legally acceptable in that first trimester, and while I tend to believe that the embryo is alive at that point, it is possible that the state has no right to make that claim.                                                                                                             

That said, the issue of whether or not abortion should be legal is different from the issue of whether or not it should be funded by government money.  Apart from the obvious problem of forcing people to use their money to pay for things with which they do not agree, morally, there is also the fact that abortion is an elective procedure, and, in the majority of cases, not something which benefits the mother's health.  This makes abortion much more akin to cosmetic surgery.  If abortion is going to be paid for with government money, then so should nose jobs, breast implants, and botox.  While I do not disagree with any of those being legal, none of them are the best use of healthcare money.  The fact is that there is a finite amount of money which is available for healthcare, and, in a nationalized system, if one person uses it, it takes away from what another person can use, and that is one of the problems I have with that type of system.  People using federal money to cover abortion means less money available to use for necessary medical procedures.