Abortion: Pros and Cons

Perhaps not since the vituperative Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and '60s, when ideology turned ugly and caused deaths and injury, has any subject been as vehemently argued as the issue of Abortion. This issue is neither academic nor even, perhaps, objective. A woman faced with an unwanted pregnancy generally understands at some visceral level that there is human life inside her, making that question moot. The fact is that most people agree that abortion should be a rare procedure Abortion is, and likely will always be, fraught with emotional and physical turmoil. The turmoil has brought into focus not merely legal accountings for the (at least) legal approval of abortion (Roe vs. Wade in 1973) but has divided much of society into two sometimes armed and irrational camps. 

It is nearly impossible to find someone who doesn't have an opinion about abortion, and probably a strong opinion at that. Both sides of the issue make a good case for their "side". An unwanted child is a pitiful thing, and the attendant social problems (single motherhood, financial destitution, child neglect, and urban overcrowding, the need for welfare, to name just a few) do not have easy solutions. While medical progress has made aborting a fetus (even in later and later terms) feasible, safe, and not financially over-burdening, the crisis that the Abortion issue brings to society is engulfed in the ethics- it is against every aspect of humanity to "kill a defenseless human being" , the morality in the sense of shame borne throughout life, as a sort of invisible Hester Prynne "A", and the legality as if the state should "rule" whether abortions can and should be legal and permitted, or ruled illegal and "murder" of sorts.
One must begin to discuss the moral and legal issues that confront us by starting at the most basic philosophical issues: First of all: What is a person? What is the concept of a person? When does life begin? With conception? With the first functioning of the fetus' organs?