Polls are hostile to "not wanting a child" as a justification for an abortion. Doug
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Hilarious. Why would anyone want an abortion, except because they didn't want the child in the first place? I will bet, ninety percent of abortions are done exactly because of such circumstances. At a guess, I would say the other ten percent are in fact medical reasons that concern potential disabilities or the mother and her health condition.
One of the more interesting aspects to this whole debate, which I haven't followed very closely---mostly because I am thoroughly bored by it and then too, every woman and girl I ever knew intimately had an abortion and stewed for years after---is that abortion has been practiced by every society I ever heard or read about for all sorts of reasons. Most societies didn't have the luxury of pre-natal care and examination, so they just had to wait and see what came out of the oven. Does it pass muster or not? If not, then out to the wasteland you go---followed by a lot of talk of demons, with smoke and noise to cover it up.
On a much more interesting level to me at least is the myth cycle of Oedipus, who was born clubbed footed and was put in the rocky wastes to die. I was born with a less severe version of this common orthopedic condition and evidently spent the first year or two of my life with a mechanical foot straightener strapped to my feet at night.
Returning to Oedipus, his abandonment in the wilderness was how he was estranged from his mother and father, how he was disinherited from his birth right, and how he came to enact his unwitting vengeance on his own house and himself. That is in effect how ancient Greeks conceived the moral issue of justifiable infanticide. It was justified because there were no noble clubbed footed warrior kings, at least in the ideal. And yet there indeed were. Perhaps the outcasts and the unwanted were of profound social value after all.
If there were any doubts about the Christian tradition on this point, let's remember that Mary was an unwed mother in poverty. If the three kings from Africa, Arabia, and Persia (I think), hadn't showed up a nacimiento, with welfare goodies, Mary might or perhaps would have put the kid out on the rocky hills around Bethlehem like Oedipus and continued on her journey with her molester-protector and co-dependent, dirty old Joe an unemployed and migrant carpenter.
CG