Don't lump abortion in with those other issues that involve denial of either rational thought or scientific evidence. It's an issue where rational people can disagree. The only way that it verges on that is in the fact that people will try to do it anyways, in ways that are historically very dangerous. In that way, it becomes like prohibition of drugs and legalization becomes a harm-reduction strategy. But, like drugs, that doesn't mean that it's a fundamentally good thing.

FYI...I say this as someone who is intentionally ambivalent on the issue of abortion. Had abortion been safe, legal and reliable in 1940, I would not be alive to write this since my mother would have never been born. And yet my grandmother would have never been forced to marry her rapist, which basically ruined the majority of her life. In confronting the issue of abortion, I'm forced to weigh my grandmother's life against that of my mother and I. I haven't figured out a way of doing that yet. But it really bothers me when people like you who've likely never had any personal connection to the issue imply that only one side of the debate is rational.

Personal nit...life does start at inception, since that's a tautology. The beginning is the beginning. It's life starting at conception that's usually debated.