LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

This article from Christian Alliance talks about ethical alternatives to abortion:

Effective Prevention vs. Criminalizing Abortion

Honoring the Sanctity of Childbearing Decisions - Jesus Taught Compassion, Responsibility, and Equality. Following His Call, We Support Responsible, Compassionate Programs That Are Genuinely Effective in Helping Prevent Unintended Pregnancy, An Outcome No Woman Wants. We Affirm That Each Woman's Body Belongs to Herself. No Woman Should Be Forced Either to Bear a Child or to Terminate a Pregnancy.

No one is "for" abortion. Most abortions are attended by an enormous amount of emotional pain. But we think the issue is effective prevention of unintended pregnancy, not criminalizing desperate pregnant women or the medical professionals who help them.

Over and over in the Gospels, Jesus is scathing in his dealings with hypocrites. We believe that Jesus would recognize the inherent hypocrisy in decreasing support for family planning or reducing access to contraception while simultaneously seeking to criminalize abortion. Such actions deny women and men access to basic help and information on family planning while, at the same time, forcing them to bear children. Abstinence-only education programs pushed by the right are actually associated with an increase in the rate of abortions. Such approaches like these increase the rate of abortions. They are not about protecting life; they are about controlling and punishing desperate women, especially poor women. Criminalizing abortion would also disproportionately target poor women who could not go abroad for a legal abortion.

We believe our nation has a responsibility to enact policies that help reduce or eliminate the number of abortions and unintended pregnancies. For example, studies suggest that expanded availability of emergency contraception and better public awareness of the limitations of current birth control methods could reduce the need for abortions by half, but this has been opposed by right-wing activists. International experience shows that many countries with the most - prohibitive abortion laws have the highest abortion rates. But places like the Netherlands that emphasize prevention while keeping abortion safe and legal have the lowest abortion rates. We call for government policies that respect the lives of women and provide responsible, effective approaches for decreasing unintended pregnancy.

Recognizing that Jesus teaches us by his example, we hold that he would treat women as full and complete partners today, just as he did in his own time. Therefore, we assert that creating secular laws to give control of a woman's body to the state is unchristian. We assert that compulsory childbearing (if Roe v. Wade were overturned), compulsory abortion (as in China), and compulsory childbearing or abortion based on the state's decision (as in Nazi Germany) all deny a woman's essential humanity and are immoral.

International studies show that legal constraints on abortion have low impact on whether women actually get abortions. This means only that women will have illegal abortions, procedures that are often unsafe or lethal. Americans know, from the time before Roe v. Wade, that prohibiting safe abortion procedures led directly to deaths of multitudes of desperate and frightened women. Extremists who want to return us to that time are unlike the Jesus we know from the Gospels; they implicitly hold that the life of a woman does not matter. Our government has a moral obligation not to enact laws that have been shown by history to cause women injury or death.