If privacy is the main issue, then I am definitely on your side. You speak well for privacy! But thinking of the issue concerning Roe v. Wade as a privacy issue begs the question(i.e., it is circular reasoning) against abortion rights opponents. Abortion rights opponents deny that the issue is privacy: they claim that abortion involves second-party victims. Indeed, they think that it involves the killing of another person. If they are right, then this is no more a mere privacy issue than is infanticide.

To some extent, the issue might be better conceived as a separation of church and state issue, since many abortion rights opponents' reasons are religious. But even that fails to do justice to the issue, because it is difficult to tell with whom the weight of secular reasons lie. In terms of secular reasons, pro-choice advocates have a hard time saying why late-term abortions are okay and infanticide is not. Pro-life advocates have a hard time saying why scratching (and thus killing skin cells) is okay but early-term abortions are not.

Having said all of that, I think that Roe v. Wade, as ammended in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, does a fairly good job (for bad or badly stated reasons) of balancing the secular evidence on both sides. So ammended, Roe v. Wade permits states to ban pre-viability abortions but forbids them to ban post-viability abortions. (Viability is the point at which the fetus could survive outside of Mom, and this point has moved since Roe v. Wade, with advances in medical science, from the end of the second trimester towards just before the middle of the second trimester.)

Privacy was the main turning point issue of Roe.

However, the Pro-Choice proponents (of which I am one) are mainly looking out for the freedoms and rights of women. Women should have complete domain and sovereignty over the own bodies - in all cases, no matter what. For a patriarchal society to even begin to think, or make rules, that force any women to remain pregnant - against her will - is the same sort of partriarchal society that allows rapes and incest to go unpunished (as it does in our society).

A woman usually finds out that she is pregnant at about 4 to 5 weeks when she misses her first period. The laws normally allow legal abortions within the first trimester, which means at 12 weeks. So, from the moment she discovers she is pregnant, a woman has about 7 weeks within which to make up her mind about what to do.

If she were required in that seven week period (less than 2 months) to go before a court to ask for rights over her own body and medical treatment - she'd have 7 weeks to accomplish it. It would be costly and an invasion of privacy. It is at that moment that she would have to prove (if the laws were restrictive like many wish them to be) that the sperm that entered her body came from date rape, rape, incest or unwanted violent intrusion. Very few rapes can be proven in court and very few women want to go throught that sort of torture.

Plus, after all of that invasion of privacy - the initial rape or incest or unwanted sex act - plus the public examination in court - she's up against the clock. She may have to travel hundreds of miles to find an abortion clinic if one is not available in her town. For that, she will need money and time off from work. Some would like to require women to walk the plank by requiring them to make numerous visits to a clinic before she can receive the operation, in hopes that she will indeed be unable to follow through. Well, who will that hurt? Poor women. Working women. Women unable to take off of work numerous times or who don't have them money or means to make numerous trips to a clinic, unnecessarily.

Let's leave women alone. Only women should decide what to do with their own bodies. Period.

Whether we are for or against abortion is not really the issue, as Nora and Sarah point out, and Peter does not seem to disagree with.

The issue here is the right of women to both privacy and sovereignty over their own bodies.

No matter what we may think about the ethics or morals of any woman's decision - we must leave the decision up to that woman to decide what will happen to her body.

No man, no government, no state should force any woman's body into a service she does not want to be in.

We are not the Taliban. American women are not the property of the government and their privacies and rights to their own bodies are not forfeited at birth simply because they are born with one type of reproductive organs instead of another.

I trust women to decide the fate of their bodies. Even if and when I don't - I should have no say in their decisions.

For those who speak only of privacy and women's rights, I am not sure which of the following two views you hold: (a) the fetus is just part of mom's body, like her appendix; or (b) even if the fetus is a person, like an infant, we should not usually force mom to care for it, like we would usually force her (and, hopefully, dad) to care for her born children.

If it is (a), okay. But this just amounts to denying the anti-abortion rights advocates' premise that the fetus is a person, like an infant. (Appendixes do not have human rights, and I am supposing that infants do.) You and they must fight it out on that issue (which is the traditional abortion battleground) -- that was all that I was saying, above. I wasn't taking a side on that issue, although I was suggesting that the best secular reasons might split the answer, as Roe v. Wade does.

I am very interested in (b), which is defended in Judith Jarvis Thompson's classic, "A Defense of Abortion". See http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm . Thompson is brilliant, and this is one of the most famoust articles on abortion, ever. However, she fails to persuade me -- a story for another day.

"Viability" is one of the more important issues in the government's attempt to control a woman's rights to her body.

The idea is that if a fetus could be "viable" outside of a woman's body, and, if the government were willing to pay for the removal of the fetus through a more costly operation and then take responsibility for its life outside the womb, then, a case could be made that the fetus has rights of its own - the right to survive outside the woman's womb.

However, if the fetus would not be viable outside the woman's womb, does the fetus have a distinct life separate from the mother's?

I believe that these decisions should be left to the pregnant woman. However, there is one truth that we cannot deny - that is - women will continue to abort unwanted pregnancies. The real question is - will they be able to carry this out in safe environments or will they be forced to use coat hangers.

And, I'll leave you with this - if our government decides to legislate what women can do with their bodies, and if we insist that they perform brooding duties against their will - what's to stop any rapist from impregnating a woman just so he can have a baby that she is required to host for him for nine months.

And, lastly, fetuses in the 1st trimester are not viable outside the womb.