Abortion is a fact of modern life.  It is necessary in a society where women expect to be more than mothers and where they expect to plan their futures. It may be essential to a society that aims for ‘planned parenthood’ and families made up of responsible, willing parents and wanted children. And in those societies that do not yet benefit from the infrastructure that comes with development, safe legal abortion may be necessary to reduce the damage and death that follows repeated unwanted deliveries and desperate unsafe abortion. However, all these reasons for abortion are beside the point. What matters most of all is that women should have the right to make their own decisions about pregnancy, privately and accountable to no person except those whom they invite to share their decision. Just as women are responsible for the children that they bring into the world, so they are responsible for the pregnancies that they end.

No society that truly respects women’s equality and individual conscience can tolerate interference with how a woman comes to decide on the future of her pregnancy. The contents of her womb are hers and hers alone, by virtue of their location in her womb. How she values the embryo or fetus that she carries inside her body is for her to decide. The responsibility for bringing a potential child into the world, allowing it to develop into a person with human interests of its own, is hers because it requires her body. This is a commitment no one else can give, and in a society that values freedom, the commitment to childbirth should be freely given: a woman can only freely commit when she has an alternative choice. While the fetus is still in her body, its life is hers and the decisions as to its future must be hers, because its future is her future.