I'm only a soulless devil's advocate when I argue the moral dimension of this; else, I'm purely being practical.
Not to pounce on it too heavily, but making drugs illegal has driven the whole community underground. People die daily because there is no medical oversight, because the dealers are criminals, and because nobody makes sure that the wares are actually good. Not to mention that it's a massive black hole for money to actively prosecute each and every one.
My proposition is thus to cancel the war on drugs and use the cash to take over the legal distribution. Think about what a government-run (or atleast supervised) drug distribution system could do: Collect taxes, guarantee the purity (and thus, relative safety), and probably still have much lower prices than the criminal dealers. Heck, you could pretty much drive an entire sort of criminals out of the country. On the other hand, medical supervision (and, I dunno? Ration cards?) could help to keep the massively deletrous effects of drugs somewhat in check. This doesn't even have to apply to the really hardcore stuff: think about how many people you'd bring away from the underground just by making the (controlled) sale of marijuana legal. After all, the real scoundrels are the dealers, and what could be more effective than driving them out of business?
What does this have to do with abortion? Well, in a sense, outlawing it would do to abortion what it has already done to drugs - drive them underground. If you ban abortions, lots of women will still want them, but they'll obtain them from less reputable sources. This is a massive health risk, and if you think abortion kills a lot of innocent lives now, consider how many more potential mothers it will take when it's outlawed.
One of the fundamental problems is that you cannot destroy the *idea* of abortion, same as you cannot destroy the *idea* of drugs. The cat's out of the bag and has been for some time. We can either try to whack it and see it jump over the fence, never to return, or we can invite it into our home and make sure it behaves.
(Damn, that was a weird analogy.)
Gatac