You are correct, some women who opt to have an illegal abortion will die. Many more than the 200 woman that die annually from legal abortions. There can be no denying that.

But the number is a small fraction of the over 61 million babies that have died in the US alone since abortions became legal. Your argument is based on the premise that unborn babies are not human… but according to the vast majority of biologists in the US they are human. According to Roe vs Wade, unborn babies while human do not have legal rights until they are viable.

So arguing “life” is a losing argument when arguing over the issue of abortion.

Your second point is simply untrue. In some countries that may be true, but in America the waiting list to adopt babies is huge. More and more successful woman are putting off having babies until their thirties and then spend thousands of dollars to get medical assistance conceiving or funding the birth of a baby by a surrogate mother or simply adopting. Some estimates put the waiting list for adopting new born babies at almost 2 million, which seems a bit high. But the situation has become more acute in the US as many foreign countries have stopped allowing US parents to adopt, teenage pregnancy rates have fallen, and more and more woman that previously gave their babies up for adoption are not doing so. All in all fertility rates (number of births per woman in a population) is way down and that is creating a huge demand for adoptable babies even as the supply shrinks.

We do need to improve our adoption process, so that fewer babies are put into foster care even if most babies are subsequently adopted out of foster care rather quickly (sadly, it is the older children that tend to languish in foster care). I do wish more American couples would consider adopting school age children abandoned by their parents instead of insisting on “newborns”, but that is a different issue and one I wish the media would focus on and encourage couples to consider. However, even here the numbers of children in foster care had been steadily declining until recently (the recent rise is due to the opioid crisis and the challenges for parents of babies that are “addicted at birth”).

So your first point while true is only half the story and your second point is not true in the US. I hear your argument concerning the “rights” of woman over their bodies and they should have rights.

But do you hear the other side of the argument, the “rights” of baby to their lives. They also should have rights. So who is the judge, when the two sides do not agree (the legal argument is that the state is required to represent the baby’s interests, when the mother’s and the baby’s conflict, which is the case when the mother opts to have an abortion).

Roe v Wade was not a ruling in favor of abortion nor was it a ruling in favor of “life”, it was compromise built on the concept of “viability”. Until a better compromise is found, I think viability will remain the legal basis for and against legal abortion… for those in favor of legal abortion, the point of “viability” keeps shrinking the legal abortion “window”. But in defense of that “shrinking window” the more we learn about the development of the baby in the womb, it is hard to justify aborting a baby after 20 weeks unless it has serious birth defects that preclude it from living beyond the womb.

For those opposed to abortion, they reject “viability” as the basis for asserting the baby’s right to life over the mother’s rights, but in doing so they simply ignore that a woman has rights.

How this issue is resolved will have profound impact over many life and death laws totally unrelated to abortion. As such abortion is not a “woman’s” issue but a “human issue”. It does not stand alone, it fits alongside related issues like euthanasia, the death penalty, and even “corporate personhood”. They all share legal arguments with abortion laws and so it is no wonder that gender support for and against abortion is about the same.

As someone who is primarily focused on health issues, I have only entered the abortion debate reluctantly, but as our nation considers “universal health” we cannot avoid making basic decisions on where a human’s right to life begins and ends and who is responsible for defending the helpless person whose life is under consideration for ending whether in a womb or a nursing home.