What is your alternative to abortion?

[Tonus]

I thought I would post this argument from something I was just skimming:

The crux of my argument in favor of abortion is that killing is basically okay. Human beings kill everything. We kill cows because they taste good, trees because we like furniture, germs because they make us feel bad, deer because we love hunting, cockroaches because they are disgusting, and thousands of other species because we just hate those rain forests so much… Pretty much every species on Earth has been killed by humans at some point for some reason.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you cry. “That may all be true but we draw the line at killing other humans!” No, we don’t. We kill old people (euthanasia, and insurance companies will even pay for it), we kill criminals (capital punishment), we kill ourselves (suicide), we kill each other (war), we kill in self-defense, we kill when we are temporarily insane, and we pull the plug on people who are in comas. I haven’t even started listing all the indirect ways we kill people: drug companies pushing dangerous drugs, insurance companies not paying for lifesaving procedures, people starving in Africa because our fat asses can’t be bothered to share some food, athletes playing dangerous sports, smoking, alcohol, and McDonald’s.

99.99% of the time it’s perfectly okay and legal to kill any living thing you want. The only exception is that you can’t kill another human being for no apparent reason. That’s murder. That’s where the line is drawn.

http://www.philipbrocoum.com/?p=402

That seems to be an argument from the perspective of practicality. For example, we do not outlaw the use of automobiles, although they are a direct or indirect cause of tens of thousands of deaths (and hundreds of thousands of injuries) every year. We do not outlaw alcohol even though it is a factor in many of those deaths and injuries. As a society, we work diligently to make driving safer; automobile design, safety features, speed limits, speed bumps, penalties for driving recklessly or impaired, and so on. But we have determined that automobiles are a necessity, and that banning alcohol was a failure. We accept that there will be deaths as a result of an activity that we protect with laws.

I understand the argument from practicality in that sense. It can make people uncomfortable because it clashes with the emotional approach (you... you mean its okay to LET PEOPLE DIE??? Well, yeah- do YOU drive a car?). I support allowing a woman to terminate a pregnancy caused by rape or incest. I think it's partly an emotional argument, but there is a practical side to it as well. A woman forced to give birth to a child under those circumstances faces additional emotional suffering that will affect her child regardless of how much she may love him/her. The other practical arguments for abortion would include slowing population growth, not wanting to bring an impaired person into the world, or realizing the economic impact that having a child entails. Those tend to make me uncomfortable on varying levels, in that I still consider each 'clump of cells' to be a potential person whose life was cut short. But that is an emotional argument, not a practical one.

One quibble with his statement is the part where he defines murder as "kill[ing] another human being for no apparent reason." As I understand it, murder is by definition a pre-meditated act, and therefore the person who commits murder often has a reason and it may be quite apparent. It may not be an acceptable reason ("he wouldn't give me his wallet," "the bastard cut me off twice!" etc) but it's quite apparent.