A short history of abortion

http://www.nationnews.com/editorial/326798256475493.php

interesting notes:

The first government to sanction abortions was the atheistic communist government of the Soviet Union in 1920, followed by Nazi Germany in 1935.
It was not however until the 1950s that any other governments or major religious bodies came to sanction abortion for the sole purpose of killing the unborn child.

For such a ruling to be credible, it was necessary to remove the legal protection of the unborn child by declaring that "legal person-hood does not exist pre-natally (i.e. a baby is not a person until it is born and therefore has no rights to life under the law)".
It is perhaps appropriate, in the circumstances, to point out that this same declaration had once been made by the Supreme Court in respect of slaves in 1857 in order to legitimise slavery and that in Nazi Germany, Gypsies, homosexuals and Jews were all declared to be non-persons in order to sanction their extermination.

(boldface added by me...)

read civil war post from yesterday.