Ireland's abortion referendum

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The curious thing about how science relates to abortion is that the advancement of advanced medicl techniques and modern embryology theory really allows the pro-life movement to exist as it does today. The ancients and the  scholars of the Renaissance largely believed life egan with the quickening: the first movement of the foetus, which represented the soul entering the child. It was the development of ultrasound that really allowed the previous black box of the womb to be opened up, to reveal the "baby" within, that gave abortion an emotional weight which it lacked before.

The big problem biologically is that although we can identify various biological markers - conception, implantation, segmentation, heart beat, lower brain function, higher brain function, viability etc. - at the end of the day the concept of "personhood" is an abstraction that can have various definitions.

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Legalized abortion is extremely and unambiguously Good, and others on the Left need to be much more unapologetic (as with myself) about their support for it. Vacuum aspiration et. al. are "unpretty", I suppose, but so is every other legitimate medical practice. Abortion does not warrant the label of "necessary evil" seeing as how there is nothing immoral about terminating a fetus.

Well, I would argue that surgical abortions - like any surgical procedure - has its own risks, and it does present a physical and mental toll on women (as does pregnancy, for that matter). That's why it's important to promote birth control and pill-induced earlier abortions over surgical ones, which in a well functioning medical system will become the exception, by and large.

(Due to a quirk of Soviet history, Russia has an extremely high surgical abortion rate which in many cases is used instead of birth control.i don't think this is particularly healthy.)