I agree with Nate Sherman in Abortion trumps animal cruelty (SN 8/29) when he mentions that women (and men!) should be prepared and willing to accept the consequences before becoming sexually active. Yet, he only makes this point after implying that women make the decision to have an abortion on some sort of whim – by simply moseying on down to the local Planned Parenthood. The choice to terminate a pregnancy is neither a flippant one nor is it a result of hasty thinking. Insinuating that this is the case is derogatory and dismissive to a woman’s ability to reason and make intelligent decisions about her body and her fetus.

The article proposes adoption as the miraculous solution to end abortions for good. This option only works if women choose to have an abortion solely because they cannot care for the child. There are innumerable other reasons not to carry a pregnancy to term. They can be medical, physical, emotional or social. Ignoring the emotional or physical reasons may put the mother’s well-being in jeopardy. If the 860,000 legally-aborted fetuses from the year 2000 were given up for adoption, they would join the 100,000-plus children already wading their way through foster care and orphanages, and this is only in the United States. These children would place a hefty burden on Mr. Sherman’s conservative pocketbook.