Baby is already dead? Abortion is perfectly justified.

While technically, this may still be an "abortion" (aborting the pregnancy), I don't think most see the term in this way. In common usage, abortion calls to mind the concept of ending a viable human life.

In general, thanks for your thoughts. I appreciate the depth of effort you demonstrate here.

The trouble - as you note - is not in the exceptional cases where 95% of people agree, e.g. health of the mother. Rather what creates the heat in this area of human thought is what you term "unnecessarily terminating a pregnancy". The problem is that once we normalize the practice, we are experts at rationalizations applying this practice for ever more particular reasons.

It's about control. We all seek to control our world and "our life" and make it behave according to our plans. It never does. Period. The fundamental idea of elective abortion (not the exceptional life of mother kind) is that becoming a parent in an unplanned way "destroys" a person's life. This is an ignorant perspective. The simple truth is that an unexpected child radically changes the course of a life, but from an objective perspective, that change is neither good nor bad. It's simply different. The mother's life will not be the same life she expected in her visualized future. But that's called flexibility. In truth, very few of our visualized futures actually come to pass. Sacrificing another human life (that of the unborn) in the name of an uncertain, fuzzy, vision of "what the future should be" is killing something concrete in exchange for a potential that likely will not materialize in any case.

Thus these people - as I noted - are deeply unhappy. They are left with the concrete guilt of knowing what they did, and yet wait... where's that "potential life" in the name of which they committed this horrific act? It doesn't come.

I'm a believer in the normalization and absolute de-stigmatization of adoption for young unwilling mothers. If the family from which she comes is not capable of caring for the child, let the child go to a home where he or she can be raised as he or she deserves.

What saddens me so about human nature is this incredible push by a significant portion of our population to treat potential human lives as the "possession" of the mother, for her to do with as she pleases, up to and including disposing of it. They fervently promote this, up to and including with violence. That is a tragic view of human lives in their most vulnerable phase - that of the fertilized egg up to birth.