Regardless of how we feel about embryos, fetuses, and their "rights"...about women and sex and responsibility...about God's will, Karma, or the Bible...the fact still remains: Women have always used abortion as a last resort to prevent the birth of a child, and they always will, regardless of what the laws say or the rest of us think. But when abortion is illegal, it is unsafe and dangerous. Therefore, abortion must be legal, and it must also be accessible.

Laws against abortion kill women. Making abortion illegal has little effect on the number of abortions, as history and present-day evidence from all over the world show. Still, illegal abortions are much more dangerous.

In the 1930s, there was "an epidemic of criminal abortion" in the United States. The number of births dropped by about half, as women who refused to bring children into a depressed economy resorted to illegal abortion to end their pregnancies. As a result, about 2,500 women died each year from abortion complications, accounting for nearly one in four maternal deaths (Pro-Choice Facts, 2000).

>From 1950 to 1965 in the US, there were 200 to 250 abortion-related deaths reported each year, a number that is acknowledged to be

Like drinking, drug use, prostitution, and unorthodox sexual behavior, abortion is a "victimless" (no complainant) crime. In 1965, sociologist and lawyer Edwin Schur looked at existing laws against homosexuality, drug use, and abortion, and concluded that the laws were futile, writing:

Women whose own health is compromised during pregnancy are more likely to miscarry and to deliver babies who are unhealthy. Their babies are also more likely to die after birth.

A woman is more than an embryo. Abortion opponents argue that an embryo is "a human being," "a person" entitled to the same rights as the woman who carries it. What they ignore is that allowing an embryo to use a woman's body against her will would give it more rights than she has, since women (including pregnant ones) are not entitled to demand the use of other people's bodies to save their own lives. In fact, children cannot gain access to the bodily resources of their parents, even when their lives are at stake (Luker, 2000).

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lower than the true death count. Even using these statistics, and assuming that illegal abortion was two or three times as dangerous as legal abortion at that time, a simple calculation shows that there were at least 500,000 illegal abortions each year. It is not worth the death of one woman, if that is what it would take, to cut the number of abortions by 60%, let alone fifty or a hundred women (Why Abortion must be Legal, 2000).

In a country like the United States, where individual freedom and liberty are paramount, it is inconceivable to imagine a successful campaign to outlaw abortion and prevent women from obtaining it illegally. The loss of civil liberties would never be tolerated. That is why the majority of Americans are "pro-choice" even though they dislike abortion.

To suppress women's use of a

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