Wren, this is a great post, but you ought to think hard about the general intransigence of anti-abortion proponents as well.

I always wonder why most of the anti-abortion people I know reflexively revert to the good old days when the abortion topic comes up, as though the good old days meant that no pregnancies were unwanted, conception always occured inside of marriage, and orphanages weren't prevalent. The fact is that Europe does not have our abortion rates because Europeans have relied on different solutions to the root problem, which could best be characterized as providing support for families with children.

Referring back to the OP's contention that single motherhood is greeted universally as an heroic condition, as a divorced single mother, I can guarantee you that single motherhood is not quite the laudable condition that she imagines it to be in our society. While I can live with being stigmatized myself - after all, it was my choices that led me to my current condition - I can find no reason why society should stigmatize my children, who hardly had a say in the matter.

And in the 70s, when I was growing up, single motherhood was a chronic condition that all but doomed a family to poverty, and the only cure was marriage - hardly an option, for example, for a woman whose husband had abandoned her and her children after she was diagnosed with M.S. (And, yes, I did know this woman.) Today women have more options, but it should be noted that an honest analysis of abortion statistics will demonstrate that the single biggest predictor of whether a woman will have an abortion not is her economic, not her marital status, although it could be argued that a married woman is less likely to be impoverished in the first place.

Provide more support for ALL families with children, and I predict that there will be a dramatic drop in the abortion rate. That is one option that anti-abortion foes will rarely consider, and you cannot have an honest debate about this topic if you refuse to review abortion statistics honestly and all options to solve for the very real problems of single parenthood are taken off the table before the debate even begins.