I found this very interesting article from Spiked Online dealing with late-term abortions and the need to defend the procedure:

The ethics of later abortion

The ethical issue is straightforward for those who believe that abortion is absolutely wrong and should never be solely a matter of individual personal choice. Similarly, there is little ambiguity for those who believe that a woman has absolute autonomy to decide on the future of her pregnancy. The difficulty exists only for those who try to straddle the gap between these fundamental positions and argue that abortion should be a woman’s choice, but it should be less of a choice in later pregnancy.

These ‘ethical straddlers’ represent a substantial section of the pro-choice community. Marge Berer, editor of the journal Reproductive Health Matters, wisely cautioned a recent pro-choice conference that: ‘How late in pregnancy abortions should be permitted and carried out is a matter of great controversy among almost everyone – except the women who need them.’ She might have added that even many of the ‘women who need them’ would claim that in general later abortion is wrong but their own case is ‘exceptional’.

To me, the argument for a gradualist approach to the ethical rightness or wrongness of abortion that depends on the gestation of the fetus is weak, lacks intellectual consistency, and seems self-serving. It seems little more than an instrumental argument to justify women’s access to abortion according to personal preference: to allow it when ‘I approve’ and to deny it when ‘I don’t approve’. Excepting those who think abortion is always wrong, most of us have personal preferences and subjective inclinations that cause us to empathise with some women’s requests but not others’. For example, some of us will identify with the woman who requests abortion on grounds of fetal abnormality, some of us will be appalled by her thinking. Some of us will be sympathetic to a woman who wants to end a pregnancy that happened because the condom stayed in the packet; some will think her undeserving. Some of us will personally feel that an abortion is acceptable in early pregnancy, but not when more time has passed.

If we are honest, we will probably admit that we all make judgements about which abortions we think are right and which we think are wrong – just as women do for themselves. But there is a world of difference between making an individual judgement and seeking to constrain others from making, for themselves, the decisions we would not. Our colleagues who argue that there should be greater justification for an abortion after x weeks are really no different to those doctors who argue that, before they approve a woman’s request, she should justify her failure to use contraception or why she is returning for a second procedure. In essence, all they are saying is that abortion should be approved when I approve and not when I do not.

To the ‘ethical straddlers’ concerned about gestation we must ask: is there anything qualitatively different about a fetus at, say, 28 weeks that gives it a morally different status to a fetus at 18 weeks or even eight weeks? It certainly looks different because its physical development has advanced. At 28 weeks we can see it is human – at eight weeks a human embryo looks much like that of a hamster. But are we really so shallow, so fickle, as to let our view on moral worth be determined by appearance? Even if at five weeks we can only see an embryonic pole, we know that it is human. The heart that can be seen beating on an ultrasound scan at six weeks is as much a human heart as the one that beats five months later.

Claims that the fetus has ‘evolving potential’ make little sense. The potential of the fetus does not evolve; it just is. A fetus may draw closer to fulfilling this potential as it develops and as its birth approaches, but the potential does not change. Indeed, from the time of conception, as soon as embryonic cells begin to divide, an entity with the potential to become a person is created. It is the product of a man and a woman, but distinct from them. It has a unique DNA and, unless its development is interrupted or fails, it will be born as a child.

To accept that the blastocyst or embryo has the potential to evolve into a person is not to say it should be treated as a person, or even that it must be accorded moral worth because of it’s potentiality. As the ethicist Professor John Harris argues, we are all potentially dead, but that does not mean that we treat people as though they are already dead.

[emphasis mine]

I would encourage you to read the entire article. The truthfulness of this author is really shocking to me. She is saying that the human child in the womb should not be taken into account when dealing with abortion. Whether that abortion is late in pregnancy or early, it does not matter. The mother should always be able to choose to abort her child if that’s what she wants. Period.

That’s pro-"choice". That’s pro-abortion.