Right. It's about time I tried to explain why I'm so annoyed about the direction this thread has taken.
Many years ago, I had a girlfriend. At the time, I was sixteen and relatively inexperienced. Sparing everybody the details, there was a possibility that she was pregnant and was significantly late on her cycle. We were seriously thinking about our options and many hard decisions were hypothetically made. As part of this stress, I actually had a day at school where I just collapsed out of exhaustion and had to be shipped off to another room for most of the day - and I didn't tell anyone what was going through my head.
It turned out that she was not pregnant but I had every reason to believe that she may have been. As a sixteen year old kid, that is a scary place to be, especially when you have very few friends and parents that, whilst very loving, are impossible to talk to about matters personal. There are many people out there in situations worse than mine but it severely affected my mental health to the point where I was basically incapable of functioning for some time. This was nine years ago.
A couple of years later, a friend of mine was pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, who had run scared when he found out. She was asking me for advice. All I said is that she does what she feels is right and I will support that decision. She went ahead with the pregnancy and now has a seven year old son - after sitting in the termination clinic and deciding to leave at the last minute. She was seventeen. I had a friend that made the opposite choice and now she is ready to bring a child into the World and feels that she can give it the best chance that she can for a happy and fulfilled life - she is now five or six months in and scared but excited. She was twenty when she made the first decision and now she is twenty-four. For the record, I'm twenty-five.
In none of the above cases (even my own) have I ever considered telling or instructing the women involved what to do. It's not my body. I might have my own thoughts, feelings and considerations but I have absolutely no right to attempt to force someone through a procedure, especially one that has the emotional impact that a termination has - or has the potential to have. At the same time, some people will weigh up their options and will conclude that they are just not ready to have a child. They might be destitute, they might be in a bad relationship, they might be homeless, any number of things. In those situations, it may be in the best interests to end the pregnancy and hopefully do so before there is a viable, survivable human life.
I believe that people should have the choice to decide. I'm not advocating that it isn't qualified, I'm not advocating that it should be a quick, unsupervised and uninformed decision. I'm not advocating that it should apply in all cases and I'm not trying to say that everybody makes a decision that I am personally happy with - but in the end it is not up to me what people decide to do and the best thing is to simply support them emotionally and physically if necessary, regardless of my personal views on the subject.
So - outright ban? You can shove that where the sun doesn't shine. Qualified, informed choices with restrictions and regulation? Yes. Spurious terminations on a whim? No.
I hope that's reasoned enough Draco. You're ruffling an awful lot of feathers at the moment and whilst you have strong views on the subject and I applaud your conviction, I doubt you speak with any experience or empathy.