You could say something like "I think that a mommy should get to decide when she wants to have a baby in her tummy and when she doesn't." And maybe say something about how sometimes she'll start to grow one but she can make it stop before it really becomes a baby.

I have pretty much no experience with kids, so simplify or complicate as necessary for age. :)

I agree with Liza. They love babies, but they also love you and their mother, right? Saying things like, "Mommies love their children and should be able to choose when they can join the family" and reminding them that it takes a long time for a baby to grow into a real baby in in the mommy's tummy is important. Making it about love and happy mommies would be how I approach it, I think.

I had this discussion with my daughter. I told my daughter that not all women want to be mommies. I let her know that women should want the baby, and if they don't, then can choose not to have one. I didn't get more detailed than that.

I had to have the abortion conversation with a 6-year-old foster child that I hardly knew, because we passed these anti-choice demonstrators as I was driving her home from visiting her birth mother. I basically told her that they believed that women should have babies even when they didn't want to (and then she said that they were jerks and thought they should go to Hell). My advice is to be truthful and use age-appropriate language. It can be hard to be accurate and age-appropriate, but you know your kid and you know how to explain things to him in a way that he can understand. It can also be difficult not to slip into anti-choice rhetoric, using words like "babies" when we mean embryos and fetuses and "kill" when we mean terminating a pregnancy. Anti-choicers have dumbed down the conversation to make people think this issue isn't as complicated and personal as it really is for every woman with an unintended pregnancy.

But don't bring up this issue unless your child asks. I think if a kid is old enough to ask, then he or she is old enough to know. Otherwise, it might be too soon.

I explained this to my siblings who are aged twelve and eight by saying, "Some people, usually on religious arguments, believe that women do not have the right to decide whether or not they want to be pregnant, and that may include times when the woman's life is in danger." The squicky details, I think, aren't exactly age-appropriate for children of my (eight-year-old) sister's age, but under my school's (and I think country's, but I'm not sure) curriculum by thirteen we have to watch a video on abortion in biology class anyway.

I explained this to my siblings who are aged twelve and eight by saying, "Some people, usually on religious arguments, believe that women do not have the right to decide whether or not they want to be pregnant, and that may include times when the woman's life is in danger." The squicky details, I think, aren't exactly age-appropriate for children of my (eight-year-old) sister's age, but under my school's (and I think country's, but I'm not sure) curriculum by thirteen we have to watch a video on abortion in biology class anyway.

My mother, even though she has mixed feelings about abortion, always told me that the only person she could decide things for was herself, and that decisions about a woman's body are something only she can make, with the help of her doctor. Also, the more I think about it, the more I remember her using very pro-choice language when she described how a woman became pregnant to begin with. When a woman chooses to have a baby, this is what has to happen (I'm pretty sure it was all explained to me in the context of a Christian marriage, but that's flexible) Yeah, now that I'm thinking about it, when I was little, choice was emphasized enough that I actually thought there was some kind of physical mechanism to it. Like mind control.

I'd probably also try to clear up the murky waters of pregnant vs. having a baby, and try to stay consistent with the fact that pregnancy is a physical condition that doesn't always result in babies, while having a baby is a choice that parents make, that doesn't actually necessitate getting pregnant.