However, most abortions happen because women feel threatened in some way and they sense the tension between self-preservation and protecting the life within her.
There are some women who have abortions without a second thought. But these women are in the minority and tend to be politically driven.
Most women's thought process on abortion resembles something like this:
She is paralyzed with fear by an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy. The way she sees it, either the baby survives, or she survives. The anguish and torture she feels is psychological torture. Because she literally believes that her life is being threatened (rightly or wrongly), she believes that she acts in self-defence. This is about survival for her.
It is analogous to her, to a situation where someone were to physically attack her from the outside, and she reacts to protect her body. Only this time the threat is psychological and comes from within. But the threat is the same, maybe even worse. In both cases she is fighting for her life.
The reason this woman would choose to have an abortion is because of this psychological trauma she experiences from the pregnancy. She feels that to make the trauma go away, she must have the abortion. The pregnancy causes her such anguish that she must stop the pregnancy in order to be able to breathe, to live, to be human and to live her life. She has no other option. She is trapped. This is not about logic for her, this is about survival. For her to survive she must do this.
So why doesn't this woman give the child up for adoption? It is because even though she acknowledges that there will be psychological effects from the abortion, she believes that the psychological effects of giving up her child would be far worse than the abortion. She has the abortion instead.
We must also throw into the mix, the fact that society has normalized abortion to such an extent, that it has become just another medical procedure. The woman knows that it is a 100% socially accepted "solution" to her problem.
