Actually, this second part of my response is not going to take as long as I thought, now that Zeke's stolen my thunder on the philosophy of law point.
I prefer to have the law legislate scientific questions based purely based on science. The fetus is an independant human life from conception on. Thus, as a human being, it is protected by our 14th amendment. I don't know what country you hail from, Gatac, so the same may or may not apply to you, but that's as far as the argument needs to go in the States.
Now, for women's deaths. I'll be generous and give the number floated by Ellen Goodman and the National Abortion Rights Action League (now called NARAL Pro-Choice America), which was 10,000 pregnant women dying each year from back-alley abortions. (This number is arguably refuted at
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040528.html) Frankly, that's a huge drop from 1,500,000 fetal deaths plus a few hundred women's deaths from "safe, legal, and rare" abortions. Once it is illegal, of course, and now that awareness of the abortion issue is so high, it is likely that massive abortion prevention programs would snap into place around the country. Planned Parenthood may even be forced to hire counselors who counsel!
That ends my first response. Next:
As I've said, I won't insist on banning all abortions. Just the 99.3% of them, the abortions of convenience. Don't forget the 250,000-strong community of people on the adoption waiting list.
As for the morning-after pill, anti-abortion advocates generally ignore the field, not least because its an area on which society is even more touchy than abortion. But you're right; illegalizing the vast majority of abortions would also illegalize the morning-after pill (though not condoms or spermicides or what-have-you).
One thing I've never understood, and maybe Vedra can shed some light on this for me: why birth? I mean, if it has the features of a human, isn't it human, whether or not it's attached to someone else by a cord? Why not call it a human at 1 or 8 or 12 years old? I am honestly confused by this.
Now I'm starting to feel guilty about ignoring the other sub-topic here. I'll post something about terrorism or tax cuts or something by month's end.
We have people on fiveminute from Argentina? Go team!
Also, last point (I promise!): Anyone know any good left-wing blogs? I'm looking for something to complement my daily OpinionJournal intake of +5000 words. My theory in life is that all news is biased and the only way to make a good decision is to read the most biased stuff you can find and balance out the extremes, so this is somewhat important.