"I can't understand how people that speak so intelligently and rationally on issues of economy and foreign policy can get so wrapped up in religious fervor over abortion.
"I am pro-choice. There is no other way for me to see it. I have to look at it as cold as possible. There are pregnant kids who have NO BUSINESS caring for a child. These children, if allowed to be born, would cause further money drain on our already too socialized country (for the most part). The mothers (for the most part) may also be forced to alter their life plans, and possibly quit their hourly waged jobs and get on the welfare system (in this scenario, the child's husband was a complete waste and spliut town). Who is benefitting from this child's birth? Not me, not the child, not the mother, not the taxpayer, not the country."
Welcome!
You make a good point about our "too socialized country." As a matter of fact, advocates of socialism, knowingly or not, actually devalue the individual's right to the fruits of his own labors (an underlying foundation of our Declaration of Independence), and, as certain Americans have embraced the ideas of socialism, they also have come to devalue the primary idea of that Declaration of Independence, the "self-evident" truth that individuals are "created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Rather than containing ideas that are dangerous to liberty, that Declaration's assertions are the very foundation of the protections our Constitution of 1787 affords.
Given that backdrop of history, is it logical that the right to life is the most basic right of all?
Perhaps children may now be looked upon as a "drain" because we first accepted the premise you identified, and if the individual's right to property produced by his own work is not honored, neither is his/her right to life.
On a more down-to-earth level, there is another idea which always bothers me when I hear discussions about whether what has, in my lifetime, come to be called a "fetus" is, in fact, a human life, separate and apart from the body that houses it, or merely an appendage of the woman. The bothersome and overlooked reality is this:
Whether the "thing" inside the woman's womb is referred to by the woman as a "fetus" or a "baby" relies exclusively on whether she, herself, wants a child. If she wants a child, every time she refers to it, she will call it a "baby." On the other hand, if she does not want to give birth to a child, there are less personal ways by which society has made it acceptable to refer to the womb's contents. If she miscarries in the early weeks of a pregnancy, one never hears a woman say, "I lost my fetus." It is always, "I lost my baby." Perhaps this is merely a matter of semantics, or is it a deeper acknowledgment that there was, in fact, a live little person whose life was at stake? And, why is it that doctors will work hard to save the "life" in the womb of a pregnant accident victim?
Another thought: I've never heard an advocate of what is called "a woman's right to choose" declare with confidence, "The world would have been a better place if my mother had ended the pregnancy that resulted in me." Does this mean that our nation's law is based on an "everyone else but me" premise?
As citizens of America and of the world, we are faced with great problems which beg for solutions if the cause of liberty is to survive for future generations. All of which brings me to another troubling question:
If, over the last few decades, our nation's law possibly has been wrong on the abortion question, how many potentially brilliant minds and gifted leaders may we have extinguished--men and women who might have developed solutions to the problems we face? I suppose this approach questions whether, for the society, a full-term human being is a potential "drain" or a potential blessing, remembering that some of history's most prominent leaders have come from circumstances of abject poverty.