A single egg is not a person (or women would charged with murder every time they menstruate). Similarly a single sperm is not a person (with, very conservatively, 100 million men of reproductive age each producing 100 million sperm per day, and with 4 million babies born per year, that's about one sperm out of a trillion -- 1,000,000,000,000 -- that will ever become a baby). So before conception, obviously, there is no issue.
Even after conception nothing is certain. Though figures vary, somewhere around half of conceptions are aborted naturally, mostly before the woman is even aware of the pregnancy, and mostly due to defects in the fetus. This is even more pronounced among women over 40 and those who have previously miscarried.
Personhood is not well defined but certainly it has some correlation with biological complexity. The complexity of a zygote is not much more than a sperm plus an egg. It grows quickly, but a human embryo is not really distinguished from that of any other mammal (such as the cow you kill to eat or the mouse you kill for convenience) until quite a few weeks into development. At nine weeks, after which abortions decline sharply, the fetus is roughly the size of a grape. And it's not a grape-sized person by any means; it's just starting to develop a skeletal structure.
Plot of abortions in the US vs. gestational age in 2004
On the other side of that coin, late in pregnancy a fetus is basically a baby. Provided some intensive care immediately after birth, babies even a few months premature can lead normal lives. Appropriately enough, very few abortions take place at this stage. The United States lags other developed nations in this respect, but even so 98% of abortions in the US take place before 20 weeks (halfway through pregnancy).
In terms of effects we can measure on a societal level (that is, not counting the erosion of America's soul), legal access to abortions is good for us as a country. Abortions still take place in nations with laws restricting or outlawing them. In these cases they are much more likely to be unsafe and the woman is much more likely to suffer complications, including death. Something like 68,000 women die per year due to unsafe abortions, mostly in developing countries. Furthermore, though it's controversial, some argue that legalized abortion lowers crime by reducing the number of children born into families that won't take care of them. Historically there has been a drop in crime 18-24 years after abortion becomes legalized in a state (as well as nationwide from Roe vs. Wade).
Abortions can be divided between elective and theraputic (to save the life of the mother, or protect her from very probably harm). I have to believe that proponents of banning theraputic abortions are in the fringe minority; at any point in pregnancy the mother is obviously more of a person than the fetus. The loss of a perhaps viable child is tragic, but less so than the loss of a woman.
Perhaps even more extreme is recent legislation (Georgia HB 954) that outlaws the surgical removal of an already stillborn fetus, even in the interest of the mother's health. It is the norm in politics right now to treat abortion as a simple issue that you can either be for or against. That is simply not the case.
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