Anybody who discounts the moral dimension loses an intrinsic part of their humanity. The unborn deserve some manner of formal protection .
Now you raise a good practical point as to why a degree of abortion is allowed in most places. However, this social necessity does not imbue the right to pretend that decisions to undertake or commission abortions are devoid of deep moral consideration.
I would agree that abortion is a moral matter. This is reflected in the secular literature authored by prominent ethicists like Peter Singer, Jonathan Glover, Ronald Dworkin, Mary Warnock, Bernard Williams, Judith Jarvis Thomson (renowned for her famous 'unconscious violinist' thought experiment), and many others, who - as far as I know - have no religious agenda.
Just to take one example, according to the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, a person is someone who is self-aware (sentient), has some kind of ability to reason, and knows that they have a future. According to Singer, this entitles them to moral consideration: it is more morally wrong to do bad things to persons. But for Singer, we only become like this quite a long time after we have been born, so a fetus is therefore not a person at any stage in the pregnancy.
Given that it is not until many months after we have been born that we start to think of ourselves as persons, Singer is in favour of infanticide in certain situations. For example, he thinks that it is not wrong in some cases to kill severely disabled infants or not to make strenuous efforts to keep them alive e.g. if they had suffered such severe bleeding in the brain when being born that they would never be able to breathe without a respirator or were anencephalic (born without major parts of the brain, skull and scalp) and therefore would never become conscious.
The capacity to suffer is another important consideration for Singer, so that if a child is severely disabled but not in pain this may rule out withdrawing treatment. In this respect, Singer actually supported the mother of a disabled boy called David Glass over and against the wishes of doctors to discontinue treatment because he thought that David gave some indications that he was capable of enjoying his life.
Although he thinks that personhood confers full moral status upon the being that develops it (and considers some animals to be in possession of personhood), Singer still believes that from the 18 week point of gestation, when the fetus may acquire the capacity to experience pain, ‘the interests of the fetus in not suffering should be taken into account in the same way that we should take into account the interests of sentient, but not self-conscious, non-human animals.’
That abortion is a moral matter is further suggested by some remarks made by Carol Sanger writing about the aftermath of Roe v. Wade in her book
About Abortion: Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America (Sanger is a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School)
:
'For some women, abortion registers as a profound loss, the date or a projected birth date reflected upon, sometimes commemorated, for years to come. For many others, the core reaction is one of relief and the welcome return of the preferred (at least for now) non-pregnant self that almost got away. Still other women experience both relief - the most widely reported emotion following abortion - and some form of regret and or wistfulness, not about the decision itself, but because the circumstances around the pregnancy - partner, finances, obligations, plans - were just not right enough to proceed.'
The above paragraph suggests that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is rarely one that is made without some kind of ethical rumination both before and afterwards.
One interesting example is to be found in the autobiography of the musician Viv Albertine:
‘I didn’t regret [my] abortion for twenty years. But eventually I did and I still regret it now. I wish I’d kept the baby, whatever the cost.’
However, she then adds:
‘I still defend a woman’s right to choose. To have control over her body and life. That cannot and must not ever be taken away from us.’