<I was married [briefly, 25 years ago] to a woman traumatized just as deeply and indelibly by the act of turning over her newborn son for adoption

So killing it would have been an improvement exactly how? I wonder how the man that he is now would vote on the matter.

Perhaps you forget what it's like to be young and/or poor, and frightened to distraction by the prospect of parenthood - especially when the prospect manifests in reality. Perhaps you forget (after all, you were probably not of reproductive age yet, but I was) what life was like for young, sexually active people before both Roe v Wade and The Pill.

Being young and/or poor does not automatically require one to be promiscuous. You talk like some poor girl is just minding her own business at the bus stop when the Bun in the Oven Fairy knocks her over the head with a wand. An astounding number of people manage to avoid making babies when they are not wanted. Surprisingly, not having sex has worked for many, although in our modern "screw anything that walks" culture, this is not always easy.

The consequences of sex and the need for a stable family to raise children were one of the reasons that cultures developed restrictive moral codes over thousands of years to deal with it. You know, those tired old morals that everyone was spitting on during the '60s?

What bothers me most of all about the "pro-life" attitude is the haughty, smug, self-righteous way they dismiss the women who are faced with a choice that will irrevocably alter at least one life, as if those women are as cavalier in their actions as the pro-lifers are in their judgements.

Haughty? Smug? And how exactly are these women "dismissed?" By being counseled against abortion? Not quite sure what you mean by this statement. Clarify? And "unthinking" is not the same as "cavalier," but the results can be the same.

Even though I am not female, I listen and understand that pregnancy is not merely something one knows intellectually. It is felt from within. The changes are unmistakable; so are the changes when a pregnancy is over, no matter the cause (birth, stillbirth, miscarriage, abortion) or the reason for termination. No one lives through it unchanged.

You're right, but I'm not quite sure what this has to do with the discussion either. It sounds like you are trying to make equivalent a miscarriage, and going in and having a kid flushed into a sink in pieces because you would rather have three kids than four and apparently can't be bothered with the dozens of ways to prevent pregnancy.

Anyone who has had a miscarriage, even in the first month or two, knows damn well they just lost a baby, not a "product of conception." Hiding abortion behind walls of euphemisms and concealment of the results may make it easier to deal with, but I'm not sure it should be.

I'm sure the quiet, sterile, violence-free technique of death by injection does not make the death penalty any less terrible to those who oppose it. It may even make their goal of eliminating the death penalty harder than if criminals were hung kicking in the air in front of everybody.