• legal for any woman, regardless of her age
  
• legal for any reason during the first seven months of pregnancy, and for virtually any reason thereafter.

Since 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of state laws which regulate and limit abortion in the following ways:

• requiring a parent to be notified or give consent before a minor daughter has an abortion, subject to a judicial bypass option which allows a teenage girl to involve a judge rather than her parent(s);
• requiring that women receive full medical disclosure of possible risks associated with and alternatives to abortion;
• requiring that after receiving such information, adult women wait a period of 24 hours before having an abortion, and minors wait 48 hours;
• prohibiting the use of state money to fund abortions for low-income women, except when the mother’s life is threatened by continuing the pregnancy, or in cases of rape or incest when payment is authorized under the federal Hyde Amendment.

• Roughly one-half of the women who had abortions in the U.S. had no other children;
• 44 percent of the women who had abortions in the U.S. had at least one previous abortion;
• 20 percent of women who had abortions in the U.S. were married; 80 percent were unmarried.

A study of Minnesota’s teenage abortion rates before and after the enactment of the state’s parental notification law found that the abortion rates for teenage girls, ages 15-17, dropped with passage of the law. (American Journal of Public Health, "Impact of the Minnesota Parental Notification Law on Abortion and Birth," March 1991.) Abortion rates in the states of Michigan, Missouri, Indiana, Virginia, Nebraska and Mississippi also decreased after passage of parental involvement laws.

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of the nation’s leading abortion provider, Planned Parenthood:

• At current rates, an estimated 43 percent of American women will have at least one abortion by the age of 45.
• Unmarried women are six times more likely than married women to abort their unborn child.
• The highest abortion rate is among 18- to 19-year-old women—56 percent per 1,000 women.
• About 15,000 abortions each year are attributed to rape and incest—representing one percent of all abortions.

(Guttmacher statistics from Facts in Brief, 1995.)

• Abortion and adverse pregnancy diagnosis
  According to a 1990 Canadian study of 22,000 women who received prenatal diagnosis, 88 percent of those who found they were carrying a child with Down syndrome aborted the unborn child.
  Other studies have put the rate of Down syndrome abortions at about 90 percent.